Lilac stepped through the Gate and felt a sensation like someone filling her lungs with ice water.
She gasped, but got no air in, and felt the tips of her fingers begin to go numb.
Then, abruptly, she was on her knees and Jennifer was gently rubbing her back, whispering calming words as Lilac slowly came back to reality.
They were on the edge of a cliff covered in blue green grass, with a light purple ocean crashing softly down below. Gentle wind blew perpetually, blowing motes of light around them, giving the surrounding space a surreal feeling.
Lilac, after some time, pulled herself together and managed to stand up, thanking Jennifer. She'd been in countless Gates, most successfully cleared, but she'd never experienced such an intense entry before, and like most of what they'd experienced so far, it was unclear what any of it truly meant.
Her list of questions kept growing, and with no clear answers in sight, she was left only with her thoughts.
As she was about to ask Jennifer how long she'd been down, a window appeared in front of her.
Quest
Seek the Harbinger of Calm, Her Lowest Majesty.
Reward: Survival
Failure: Death
Source: Constellation [Origin of Secrets]
Shock raced through Lilac's body as she read the window. Quests were exceedingly rare, and almost always marked an event of great importance, but what the hell was a Constellation?
Despite near constant research and exploration, much of the new ways of the world were still unknown to even the most well informed, and Lilac fell short of that by a wide margin. She felt a rippling in the pit of her stomach and closed the window with an annoyed swipe.
Failure: Death?
Obviously. When was a Gate ever NOT a battle between life and death?
Jennifer looked at Lilac curiously and asked, "Are you ok, Captain?"
"Did you get the quest window?"
Jennifer shook her head and shrugged as she responded, "Maybe its a one person quest?"
The reason Lilac had taken Jennifer as her second in command was because of this exact reaction. Solid and unflappable, Jennifer took in everything, assessed, and worked to find a successful course of action with little concern for what something might 'mean'.
Before being assigned to Lilac's team, she had led her own, with great success and under such tight security clearances, that even Lilac as her new superior couldn't access them.
It never bothered her, particularly since almost everyone in Lilac's team had special backgrounds and were well known in their respective fields of expertise.
November, for example, had been an expert in restorative magic, though she was also well known for her skills with other forms of magic.
The thought of November's magic brought Lilac back to her senses as she realized she wasn't feeling that oppressive crushing of her stats anymore. Pulling up her status window, she was pleased and mildly confused to see that they were back to normal and the curse had been removed.
Was it just applicable in that hallway?
Had it not been an effect of the Gates, but something else?
More questions added to the list of ever increasingly esoteric problems she had no solutions to.
Checking her surroundings, she found the remains of several Walkers, lying on the ground, their bodies dessicated and wrapped in the grass, peaceful expressions on their faces.
There were no visible wounds or signs of combat, and a brief examination made Lilac think they had just, for no reason, lay on the ground and happily died.
The disappearances they'd been initially briefed on now made more sense, since if they'd somehow made it into the temple and through that hallway, it was definitely believable they'd simply fail at clearing Gates of such a high rank.
A pulse of energy from deeper in the Gate caught her off guard in her introspection and almost knocked her off her feet.
Multiple emotions throbbed within her, each stronger than the last.
Peace.
Calm.
Acceptance.
Its so hard outside.
Its so loud and scary.
Its scary and it hurts.
It hurts.
It hurts.
IT HURTS!
Lilac felt herself falling, like a weight had begun pushing her down, the feelings of peace and fear crushing her with the sheer force of their intensity.
A hand on her shoulder brought her back, along with a vague sense of emptiness.
Jennifer shook her head slightly, a look of concern in her eyes.
They flickered a bright, unnatural red for the briefest moment, so fast that Lilac almost didn't see it. Somewhere in the back of her mind it registered that she should recognize it, that it was a serious problem she needed to address…but Jennifer's touch kept her from fixating on it.
Slapping her cheeks, Lilac, once again, brought herself back to focus, and stood up and looked toward the source of the energy.
"Seek the Harbinger of Calm," she whispered to herself.
Gathering themselves for the upcoming journey, Lilac and Jennifer began walking, carefully stepping around the corpses.
The trek was…unnervingly peaceful.
Though Jennifer seemed unconcerned, Lilac kept her guard up the entire time they travelled for the first few hours.
Unlike the hallway in the temple, time felt coherent here, and Lilac chose to believe in that sense of reality. The light along the horizon never seemed to set or darken, but Lilac could feel the fatigue setting in, and they stopped for a break.
While they looked for a place to settle down, Jennifer spotted a broken structure in an empty field, missing its roof and constructed with what appeared to be modern materials.
Once they entered, they noticed that despite the damage, it was still powered by some unseen source, with a strange lamp that turned light off instead of on.
Lilac sat down on a damp cushion while Jennifer gathered samples of the advanced tech inside, which far surpassed the building itself.
They rested for several hours, uneventful, but unsettling nonetheless.
The pulse of energy from before hadn't returned, but the fear she'd felt at the end held Lilac in thrall.
What could cause such intense and overwhelming fear…and what kind of entity could project it so powerfully.
Reflecting on the sensation now that she'd had time away from it, she noticed that the feeling itself had a sense of…innocence to it?
Not quite childlike, but there didn't seem to be any malice within…just fear.
A thought came to mind, unbidden, almost as though spoken by someone to her, rather than something she'd come up with herself.
Chaos is the realm of Passion and Anger.
Peace is the domain of Calm and Terror.
It made a certain kind of simplistic sense to her, and she mentioned it to Jennfier, who shrugged off the mention that it hadn't felt like Lilac's own thoughts.
"The only ones who have the leeway for fear are people who lack the strength to destroy what frightens them. That's what makes courage so important, its a weapon of the weak to overcome what could overpower them," she said in a matter of fact tone.
"What about anger then," Lilac asked, curiosity in her companion rising.
"I don't think there's a clean duality to any of this," Jennifer answered, continuing, "Peace and Chaos are two sides of the same coin, and will always have places that overlap, and even then those overlaps might change. The things that inspire anger in some, will incite fear in others, and even the powerful can be peaceful."
Lilac thought about it for a few minutes and said, "Then why differentiate the two along those kinds of emotions?"
"Maybe Peace and Chaos are just the closest terms we can understand for things more complex than we know? Kind of like how some languages have phrases and words that we can't convey in English, so rather than fumble to say it in English, whoever put those thoughts in your head used the most concise word they could find for you to understand," Jennifer mused.
"You seem pretty ok with the idea of someone able to put thoughts in my head," Lilac noted.
Rolling her eyes, Jennifer responded, "Nothing about this is normal or safe. At this point, I'll be happy if it only ends with sharing sketchy wisdom with you."
The silence between them was awkward, like both of them knew there was something that had been left unsaid, but neither of them could find words to express it.
Outside, it began to rain, though the building's roof kept them dry.
The warmth and shelter from the rain gave Lilac comfort, but there was something that wasn't right, though, like so many things prior, she was unable to navigate to a reason why.
Outside in the rain, muffled sounds of the surrounding town rang out.
Calls for children to come in out of the rain, and shopkeeps rushing to bring in their wares, and a hundred other little noises wove a melody of normality, and despite knowing they were in a Gate, Lilac felt at peace.
In the dark of their little house, an intense flash of bright red light briefly illuminated their room, and Lilac jumped off of her cushion in panic.
What could have caused that?
Jennifer stood where she had always been standing, her hand in a guarded position, ready to draw her weapon in a moment.
Seeing her partner so ill at ease, Lilac stood and laughed, opening the door and saying, "Jen, you've got to calm down, we're totally…."
Beyond the threshold there were signs of a town where there had previously been none, the ruins in complete desolation.
The sounds of life still ringing in her ears, Lilac stepped out and looked around.
True memories of where they were flickered in, past the peace she had been feeling, the calm of being at home in a familiar town.
Apprehension filled her as she looked around her again, noticing that the building she and Jennifer had taken refuge in was little more than crumbling walls.
Skeletons surrounded it, the ground scraped by their hands as though they were trying to claw their way inside.
The world closed in around Lilac, and she felt her heart pounding rapidly, threatening to burst out of her chest. She gasped, struggling to draw breath as she looked around, desperate to understand what was happening to her.
Around the skeletons, the grass was brown and dead, breaking into particles of ash even as she looked at them.
Focusing too hard for a moment, she was terrified to see that the entire world was dead, cracked and dry dirt where there had been tranquil oceans before. The building behind her was shattered into rubble, with even its initial defenses nonexistent.
Then, like a mirage, the grass was back.
Light flitted around them, riding the wind as passengers to a destination they would never know.
She heard the waves crashing beyond her vision and the skeletons along with their destroyed village, were gone, replaced with the empty field they'd first taken rest in.
Jennifer gave Lilac a knowing look before whispering, "We need to finish this…before you end up like the monsters by the Gate."
They pushed on immediately, those last words hanging between them with a finality that Lilac knew better than to challenge.
She was compromised.
She didn't know when or how it had happened, but she didn't intend to die in this Gate. As they walked, messages from the taken team began coming in, though the first one decided for her that they weren't worth checking.
A single picture.
Glowing gold eyes…and corpses. The corpses of her team, neatly severed and organized into rows, first by type, then length.
After everything so far, she was unsurprised, though the idea of telling their families that she was responsible for their deaths was difficult.
It had all been her decision whether they should stay and investigate or leave, and, while she was debating, the worst had happened.
Though she ignored the other messages and what it could mean for someone to send them through another person's system, which should be impossible, there was an additional feeling she couldn't shake.
A thought that slowly built its way past the cold wall of separation from the situation she'd been trying to construct, to stay calm and sane in the midst of steadily growing madness.
It had started slowly, as these things do.
Building up from stomach and relaxing tension she hadn't realized was as bad as it was.
As it reached her mind, she accepted it and asked aloud to the motes of light, voice barely audible against the wind.
"Why do I feel relieved it wasn't me?"