“No, the darkness will not prevail. It will not overrun us. That’s nonsense! I will go out there and destroy it. Every slimy trace of it. You know I can!” Ray heard herself shout.

  Her thoughts were still numbed by cold emptiness, yet her hatred and her resolve steadied her, keeping her from collapsing or standing there uselessly.

  “Yes, you probably can. Your Light is so bright that little will withstand it once you are done. But that is irrelevant. Not only the Nightmares, time itself may one day end all of this."

  He fell silent, shook his head, twitiching under the burning flames. "What if I forget something important? What if past ideas gifted to this place are overwritten by new ones? What if no new ideas come at all? Will only a desolate place remain in the end, something that no longer remembers you? Those who came before? Those who have now passed? I can see it… All these buildings twisting in time. Trying to resist the forgetting that will first distort all our ideas and then devour them…?”

  Ray wanted to respond, as did Nobea, but Stirleo screamed again and sank deeper into the floor.

  Ray did not know what to answer. She had never thought about the things the Abbot was now raving about in half-mad terror, and did not plan to. They did not matter in the moment.

  “Focus, we are under attack, here and now! At least one Nightmare is here!” Nobea shouted at him as she cautiously approached the Abbot’s body, now almost completely swallowed by the stone floor.

  “Nightmares… yes, the Nightmares… What if they infiltrate us? If not time itself erases us but the darkness? What if it slowly diverts all we desire from its path and leads it into the swamps and chasms within ourselves, our Inner Worlds, where it festers and rages and—”

  Another tremor ran through the hall.

  The marble floor jolted. Dust sifted down. Above, the ceiling sagged. Long ridges pushed downward and hardened into jagged spikes that scraped against one another with a grinding shriek.

  The hall did not merely sway, it distorted. Ray felt the vibration climb her legs and settle in her spine.

  Nobea finally moved. Light burst from her skin in layered colors. The air around her shimmered as she lunged and seized Stirleo by the shoulders.

  Her hands struck the black fire. The flames snapped toward her wrists and gold and violet light flared in answer. The two forces collided with a sharp hiss. Sparks scattered across the marble and burned small, smoking pits into the stone.

  Nobea’s jaw tightened. Her Light pressed forward. The fire recoiled, then flared again, wrapping around Stirleo’s shoulder like molten tar. Keeping away from her hands now, just barely contained.

  It was enough. She pulled.

  Stirleo’s body tore halfway free of the floor with a crack that split the marble around him.

  “What are you doing? Run! Find the Nightmare! Destroy it!”

  Nobea's voice fractured the air. The remaining Scholars and Disciples broke from their paralysis and ran.

  “Ray! Kill that thing! Find it and kill it! Didn’t you train for this? GO!”

  Ray blinked. “Do you… have it under control, nobea?”

  Even as she asked it, she heard how useless it sounded.

  “Of course not!” Nobea dragged again. The floor split another inch.

  Ray turned and ran.

  Behind her, small stars flickered into existence around Nobea’s arms. They pulsed in rhythm, pressing against the black flame. Driving it back more, slowly. Sweat shone on Nobeaas face, reflecting her Lucidity. Stirleo’s body jerked with each pulse.

  Ray did not look back again. The corridor twisted ahead of her.

  She pulled her own Lucidity inward.

  It tightened around her bones first. Then her skin. Then her breath. White Light settled beneath her ribs and spread outward until it pressed against her limbs like fitted armor.

  This is how it should be! Fortification done right!

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  The floor shifted. The wall rotated beneath her feet. She adjusted without thinking and kept running, sandals striking what had once been the ceiling.

  Her thoughts were not steady either.

  Demoa’s voice echoed through her memory. Grief was still there, raw and unfinished. Beneath it, something colder gathered itself into a single line of intent.

  Find it. End it.

  The bronze gates rose before her, inverted and sealed.

  Ray did not slow. She thrust both hands forward. White light left her palms in a single surge.

  The gates glowed dull orange. Lines spidered across their surface. The doors folded inward and collapsed into a liquid sheet that ran down the frame in steaming rivulets.

  Ray leapt through the opening. Winds tore at her clothes. The valley tilted beneath her. Buildings shifted mid-flight, rising like walls.

  She saw the roof too late.

  Ray thrust her Lucidity forward to slow herself, like a cushion. Too late.

  Light thickened in front of her body, but momentum carried through.

  She hit the ceiling hard.

  Tiles shattered and wood beams snapped. The roof caved in under her weight and exploded outward in a spray of splinters and red dust.

  She rolled once and came to a stop amid broken timber.

  For a moment, there was only ringing in her ears.

  Then she pushed herself upright.

  Her Lucidity still held. No blood. No broken bones. But the impact had drained her; the white light at her skin flickered before stabilizing again.

  Around her, the world had come as distroted and mixed as her thoughts.

  Hills hung sideways. Towers grew from walls at impossible angles. Entire sections of the Monastery had folded upward as if someone had seized the landscape and wrung it like cloth. nothing made sense.

  Gravity pulled from a direction that did not match the sky.

  Above her, through a jagged hole in stone of the building she had smashed into, she saw the hall she had just left, now suspended vertically, its torn gates exposed to open air.

  Ray kicked a broken door out of the crumbling building. It clattered down the slope and vanished between slabs of displaced stone.

  She looked up.

  The sky did not sit where it should. It folded backward behind towers she did not recognize. Halls had grown from other halls. Roofs pierced walls. Balconies sprouted from empty air and split into copies of themselves.

  Paths divided and redivided. Railings threaded over one another like tangled wire. Trees rose, duplicated, and rose again.

  The Monastery was not collapsing. It was proliferating.

  In the distance, figures flashed in sudden bursts of Light. Some reappeared elsewhere. Some did not reappear at all as distorded patterns woke them.

  Ray forced her breath steady.

  This is not random. It has begun in the valley, i think. Demoa woke first. The black flames followed that.

  All around her, people ran. Some screamed and stumbled. Others darted between structures that erupted from the ground without warning. A few stood inside shimmering auras, bracing themselves against the distortion as if holding back a tide.

  Ray did not hesitate.

  She launched herself from the rubble toward a gray tower forcing its way through the roof of a pagoda.

  The ground beneath her feet dropped. Below her, a Disciple looked up. His mouth opened.

  The wall beside him split with a sharp crack.

  A golden railing punched outward.

  Three metal bars drove straight through his torso. The impact lifted him half a foot off the ground before the bars locked into place.

  His hands clawed once at empty air. Then his body fractured into the patterns without colors, shifting and contorting. The metal remained.

  Blood still seeped across the railing. It did not dissolve.

  Ray felt something inside her turn colder. Her gaze fixed on the red streaks drying against the gold.

  Who did this? WHO?

  The bloodied railing shifted, its surface rippled. New bars pushed outward. They branched and multiplied, spreading from the original frame like thorns forcing through bark.

  Two shot toward her chest.

  Ray screamed. Not in fear, but in rage. Red light burst from her body.

  The metal glowed. The bars softened and curled. Steam shrieked as the gold liquefied and splashed to the stone below in smoking drops.

  The thorned structure collapsed inward on itself, leaving only warped stumps fused to the wall.

  Pathetic. You will not get me like that. Whoever the fuck you are. You may have gotten to Domea and Stirleo, but not to me!

  With the railing, the blood vanished as well. Nothing now remained of the man but a darkening pool at the base of the stone covered with modlten gold.

  Now nothing here remembers you. like Stirloe said.

  The thought came after the action, heavy and sickening. Ray for a moment thought it had not emerged from within her but from around her. The Monastery burning in the same fear Stirleo was.

  The ground jerked once more, relentless. Gravity seized her from the side.

  Ray’s body snapped sideways through the air and the horizon flipped. Trees corkscrewed upward along a spiraling slope that had not existed a second ago.

  She twisted mid-flight.

  White light flared around her ribs and shoulders as she drove her Lucidity outward, overflowing.

  It expanded in a tight sphere, no wider than three arm’s lengths from her skin.

  The rest of the Dream continued tearing itself apart.

  She landed hard but upright surounded by her stabilized pocket, now a dome.

  The trees around her multiplied, trunks splitting into duplicates that grew from their own bark. Branches threaded through one another until the sky was cut into fragments.

  She searched for orientation. Down no longer meant down. Ahead meant nothing.

  Then she saw it.

  A deep pit had opened where level ground had been. At its bottom, sky shone like water.

  Disciples clung to the inner walls. They waved and shouted up at her. Their mouths moved in panic, but she could not hear them over the smashing and shifting of the Monastery.

  A Scholar stood among them, arms raised.

  Light spilled from her hands and arced outward. It curved and sealed into a dome as well, following her example.

  The barrier thickened, layer upon layer, until the pit was capped in a translucent shell that shimmered under the strain of the shifting world around it.

  Ray hovered at the edge of her own dome of stillness, suspended between motion and decision.