He stepped forward, crossing the boundary where obsidian glass met eternity. Each footfall thundered through the void, reverberating in his marrow as though the very act of moving reshaped the world. The air hung in heavy suspension, thick with expectation, time itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting for what might come.
She appeared before him, her form outlined in eerily pure moonlight, a glow foreign to this realm of shifting shadows. Walakina's presence was spectral yet achingly real. Her hair streamed behind her like smoke unraveling in the wind, and her eyes reflected endless sorrow, a burden of lost worlds and forgotten promises. The hush of the forest seemed to exhale, and somewhere far off, in myth's cradle, roots might have trembled with the pulse of divine memory.
She smiled, barely, a shadow of tenderness suffused with regret. It wasn't warmth or welcome, it was the quiet grief that lingers in those who have loved and lost.
Sawerigading's thoughts surged. How can someone feel so heartbreakingly present in a place built from dreams and echoes?
His voice came out rough, like roots torn from the earth. "I crossed darkness, storms, and the silence between stars to find you. Yet standing before you, I am more lost than ever."
Walakina's gaze soothed and unsettled, as fluid as moonlit water. She answered softly, "You came."
He hesitated, the weight of longing pressing against the walls of his chest. "I believed you vanished into legend. But if this is real, why do you stand so close, yet seem impossibly distant?"
Her silence was profound, wordless, carrying truths deeper than speech. Finally, she looked to the reflection of stars upon the obsidian lake.
"This place," she whispered, "remembers love as both haven and cage. It never forgives what lives only as memory."
The silence wrapped them both, a silence colder, older, than any grave. Sawerigading bridged the final space, his question barely more than breath. "You remain here. Why?"
She let the pause stretch, then finally replied, voice thin as the edge of dawn. "Even a ghost longs for home."
Those words settled into him, heavy as fate. Sawerigading realized he had yearned not for reunion, but a sense of belonging, an echo of her presence, a hope she might linger.
But then he saw her mask falter. Her smile fractured, her eyes clouding with distance, like she glimpsed a world beyond this shadowed plane. Something in the space shifted, urgent.
Sawerigading's heart froze.
Walakina's form blazed, scattering like glowing embers on a sudden wind. Her final words floated back, intimate and piercing: "You found me... but you must let me go."
And then, like the sigh of a collapsing star, the ground split and fell away. Time spun and shimmered, darkness rushed in. The void claimed everything, dragging Sawerigading and the remnants of his hope deeper into the unknown.
Beyond the silence, something new waited, a mystery yet to be named, a fate yet to be claimed. The story did not end here; on the other side of shadow and ruin, the light had yet to decide whom it would greet.