Descent Without Steps
There was no doorway.
There was no passage.
When Elior and Mira placed their hands upon the altar, reality buckled.
The world peeled open like an old scroll, edges fraying into luminous mist.
One step, and they were falling—not through space, but through meaning.
Each heartbeat dragged them deeper:
Past memories that weren't theirs.
Past futures that never came to be.
Past lives dreamed but unlived.
Mira clutched his sleeve, her voice a thin thread in the storm:
"Don't let go. It's not just illusions—it's seductions."
Elior nodded grimly.
This place didn't want them lost.
It wanted them claimed.
The Dream Beneath
At the nadir of the fall, they landed—softly, impossibly—on a surface that wasn't ground but consent.
Above them: a sky stitched from broken glyphs.
Below them: an endless ocean of half-seen eyes, blinking slowly.
And in the center of everything stood a shape.
It shifted as they looked:
A towering judge robed in lightning.
A weeping child clutching a burnt book.
A beast made of stitched prayers.
It was not one being.
It was every belief ever traded, forgotten, or abandoned.
And it spoke—not in sound, but in compulsion:
"What will you offer?"
The First Question
Mira almost buckled under the weight of it.
Elior stepped forward, glyphs burning along his arms, his soul braced against the pull.
"I offer choice," he said.
"Not sacrifice. Not surrender. Choice."
The entity shivered, as if amused.
"Choice is currency without guarantee," it said.
"Choice is an insult to hunger."
Still, it listened.
And that was enough.
Elior pressed on.
"You protected the city once. You fed from it. It dreamed you into existence.
Now it chooses differently.
We choose to write."
The Dream Beneath considered.
And around them, new paths began to spiral outward—threads of possibility, fragile and luminous.
But each thread carried a hidden price.
The Threads of Debt
Mira saw them clearer than Elior:
One thread offered freedom—but demanded Elior's erasure from all memory.
One thread offered power—but would fracture Mira's mind into a thousand dreaming selves.
One thread offered rebirth—but only if the city's history was rewritten, erasing its survivors.
No thread was clean.
No victory came without blood.
"We have to choose carefully," Mira whispered.
"No," Elior said.
"We have to weave our own thread."
The Dream Beneath roared—not in anger, but in something closer to... interest.
Maybe even hope.
And so, under the blinking gaze of forgotten gods, they reached for the impossible.