His vision frayed, blurred at the edges like oil across still water, and pain—incandescent and web-like—radiated through every cavity, tendon, and nerve.
Yet even so, he extended his withered, skeletal hand toward the figure in crimson—toward the dancer, who moved with effortless grace beneath the vaulted dome of stars.
But the dancer, immersed wholly in their sacred choreography, gave him no notice. Seemingly immune to his presence, untouched by his suffering
A thought, seditious and irreverent, bloomed in the deepest sanctum of his soul: Was this to be the end? Was this all that remained of devotion?
He felt betrayed, was this what it meant to be a priestess of Fyr? Was this all that it was worth to serve his Lord?
He had served the Flame. He had walked the path of Fyr with reverence. And yet, here he lay—burnt, abandoned, and silenced.
His thoughts turned, unbidden, to distant memories: the warmth of his mother's hand, the wisdom in his father's gaze, the laughter that once wove through the communal halls of his youth.
All of it — torn away. All of it — replaced by this crucible of agony.
He wanted to cry, he wanted to scream and shout out into the universe.
But there was no voice left with which to curse or cry.
His flesh had already been rendered into pain; his tears had long since crusted into salt; his voice had been sanded down to a ghost of breath.
His arm fell. His palm collapsed into the scorched sand, fingers splayed as if they had once held something precious and now held nothing at all.
He rolled onto his back, gaze ascending to the celestial canopy above—a sky thick with stars, each one burning like a promise he could no longer trust.
A bitter taste rose in his mouth, the bile of unanswered questions. All those burning questions slumbering within him painted the void.
Every glimmer above became a demand without reply.
Was it all for nothing? Had the heavens always been indifferent?
He was silent, his vision blurring in and out of reality. His vision began to shift—no longer purely of this world. Between the stars, in the empty space where others saw void, he began to see pattern.
The silence that enfolded him gave way to a higher order of perception, an emergent lattice forming across the expanse. Invisible lines—psychic filaments—stitched one star to another.
They arced and wove through the firmament like sacred geometry traced by unseen hands.
The dancing figure drew closer now — not for his benefit, but as a cipher to the stellar code above. Their limbs punctuated the sky, their rhythm synced with the flickering of the distant bodies.
Each movement—be it fluid or abrupt—corresponded to a subtle pulsing in the stars, as though their dance were both interpreter and instigator of some deeper, astrophysical grammar.
Where once he saw random points of light, he now perceived celestial syntax, calls and responses etched into stellar time.
And then, the pattern coalesced.
From the tangled skein of distance and light, a shape emerged—a presence assembled from the impossible:
An Ellipt.
More commonly known to the the people of Aishaw as a Star-Creature.
Not a being in the conventional sense, but a metaphysical interface—an entity woven through imaginary space, constructed through symbolic resonance to pierce and interact with the tangible layers of reality.
It did not arrive, for it had always been.
The dancer was merely its echo, its conduit, its veil. And Altha, broken but attuned, was its witness.
Blinking slowly he eventually succumbed to darkness. Then, with a sudden clarity, they snapped open as he felt something pierce into his chest and rupture his heart.
It was a black rod, the same one the dancer had held. He turned his gaze toward the figure, who now circled his prostrate and impaled form with an almost ritualistic cadence, her limbs weaving the air in an intricate choreography, her lips moving in the articulation of some arcane, unfamiliar tongue.
As the molten flames spread from one end of the rod to fill his insides, the flames from the other end crept down the rod's onyx surface and fell upon his bare skin, setting his body ablaze.
The flames reduced him to white hot iridescence, and though the pain was great he found himself unable to even move, was he too tired or was it an emergent property of the Fyr? He couldn't tell.
What he could tell was a deep spring of power welling within him.
The Fyr wrapped around all of him completely encompassing him both inside and out, like a cocoon of light, heat, and solar energy... he was a star.
And all stars no matter how bright, must burn.
He wanted to laugh, but instead found himself succumbing to darkness.
When next consciousness came, dawn had breached the far temple's silhouette, its light spilling across the resting sun. The dancer was gone. The rod, too, had vanished.
He looked down—his hands were unmarked, the ravages of fire erased. His garments had been reduced to ash, save for the scarlet vestments of his priesthood, which clung to him like the last remnant of an earlier life.
Her Amarok was nestled close to her.
Again, he raised his hands before his eyes. Just beneath the skin ,an unfamiliar current coursed through him, as though the very blood within had been transmuted into something new, something potent.
He rose slowly, his form —now unmistakably feminine— concealed beneath the heavy fall of his cloak, a body at once his own within this phantasmal world of memory, and yet largely alien to him outside of it.
The sensation was disorienting, a dissonance that lingered in his bones.
With a long, weighted exhalation, he began the measured walk toward the distant temple.
The Amarok, roused from slumber by the faint scrape of his steps, padded to his side with an unhurried, lupine grace.
No anger burned in him. No joy stirred. Instead, he felt a strange, cavernous hollowness, as though the very architecture of his spirit had been excavated and left bare.
Then, without warning, reality seemed to dim, eclipsed by a single, burning phrase:
> [Eldur-Crest: Evolving]
He could barely register the voice, but not for a lack of clarity on it's part.
Altha looked around the empty chamber. The spiders were gathered around him, his lips were dry, his clothes were wet with sweat, his eyes were puffy and tinted red.
They had been watching, waiting, perhaps even far past the point of completing their analysis.
He studied his hands, recalling their skeletal frailty in the vision. The memory sent a shudder rippling through him —The remnants of a truth he could neither fully embrace nor entirely reject- an uncomfortable reality reverberating in the echo chamber of his mind.
The urge rose suddenly, almost violently: to bring his head down upon the stone floor, to crush thought with immediate, physical pain. As though present agony could wash away the indelible stain of what he had just endured.
But reason, fragile yet unbroken, restrained him. He was shaken, not stripped of his sanity. After all a concussion wouldn't help him escape any sooner.
Frustrated, he drove his fist into the wall. Once. Twice. Again and again, each blow cracking ancient stone, dislodging dust and fragments from the decaying architecture above.
Finally, with one last strike, he stopped. His breathing was ragged. He lowered himself to the cold floor, closed his eyes, and let the silence envelop him.
He was there for an hour, maybe two, reconciling with himself, wishing somehow to forget but also opposed to letting the memory go, it was his now. Like it or not... it was his.