*Day 1 - After the Fall*
Ora woke to darkness and the taste of copper.
No—not darkness. Something worse. A gray twilight that had no source, no direction, as if the concept of light had been drained from the world and replaced with its memory. The colors were already wrong—reds looked tired, like dried blood instead of fresh. Blues had dulled to the color of old bruises. Day one of her transformation, and the world was already losing its vibrancy.
She lay buried under tons of crystallized matter that had once been the Academy's pride, and she knew with absolute certainty that she should be dead.
The weight above her was impossible. The largest piece, directly over her chest, had to weigh as much as three horses. She could feel its mass pressing down, could trace the spider web of cracks running through it where it had partially shattered on impact. Her ribs should be powder. Her lungs should be compressed into nothing. Her heart should have been forced through her spine.
Instead, she breathed.
The breathing hurt—everything hurt—but it was possible. Air found its way through gaps in the rubble, thin streams that tasted of ash and ozone and something else. Something sweet and rotten, like fruit left too long in the sun.
She tried to move her right arm. Pain exploded from shoulder to fingertips, but the limb responded. Slowly, carefully, she began to push against the crystal above her. It should have been futile. A girl of sixteen years, even one trained in the magical arts, shouldn't be able to move tons of crystal.
The crystal cracked. Then shattered.
Not from her strength—she had no strength. It shattered because something in her touch was antithetical to its nature. Where her palms pressed against it, the crystal began to darken, its perfect lattice structure collapsing into something that looked like obsidian but felt like frozen screams.
She pushed again, and the corruption spread. The crystal above her didn't just break; it *unmade* itself, dissolving into a fine black dust that fell on her face like snow from a nightmare. She coughed, tasting death on her tongue, and kept pushing.
It took her an hour to dig herself out. Or maybe it was minutes. Or days. Time had become negotiable in this new world. When she finally emerged, pulling herself from the cairn of her would-be grave, the sun was wrong.
It hung in the sky at what should have been midday, but its light was weak, filtered through a haze of crystalline dust that would probably never fully settle. Crysillia—what remained of it—sparkled in this dying light, a city of broken prisms and shattered rainbows.
Ora stood on unsteady legs and looked at what had been her home.
The destruction was absolute, but also beautiful in the way that all terrible things can be beautiful. The towers hadn't just fallen; they had transformed. Some had become forests of crystal spears, reaching toward the sky like the fingers of buried giants. Others had melted and reformed into shapes that hurt to look at, geometries that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space.
She looked down at her hands. They were wrong. The skin was still there, but she could see through it in places, as if she were becoming glass from the inside out. Dark veins ran beneath the translucent flesh, pulsing with something that wasn't quite blood. When she flexed her fingers, she could see the tendons move, black cords under frosted glass. The air around her was colder now—not just the three degrees from before, but five. Her soul weight had shifted too, from the light 3 of a sheltered youth to something heavier, denser. The corruption was adding mass to her very essence.
*Lyra.*
The name hit her like a physical blow. Her sister. Her brilliant, devoted, fourteen-year-old sister who had stood in a circle of harmony while the world ended, trying to hold back chaos with nothing but her voice and her faith in the order of things.
Ora turned toward where the Ancient Harmonics classroom had been. The rubble was sharp, slicing her feet with every step, but the wounds closed almost as quickly as they opened, sealing with that same dark corruption that was spreading through her body.
She found Lyra's classroom. The students who had been singing, holding their circle of harmony, had been transformed at the moment of their death. They weren't corpses in any conventional sense. They were statues of living crystal, frozen in their last moment, their faces serene despite the violence of their end.
But Lyra wasn't there. Where her sister should have been, there was only a human-shaped gap in the crystal formation, an absence that spoke louder than any presence could. The light Ora had seen—that brilliant, impossible light that had consumed Lyra in her last moment—had left nothing behind.
No. Not nothing.
There, in the center of where Lyra had stood, something gleamed. Ora fell to her knees, crystal shards cutting deep, and reached for it with trembling fingers.
A lock of hair. Lyra's hair, but transformed. What had been brown with gold undertones was now strands of actual light, solidified somehow, warm to the touch and humming with a frequency that made Ora's corrupted flesh ache.
She held it to her chest and screamed.
The scream that tore from her throat wasn't human. It was the sound of crystal shattering in reverse, of harmony becoming discord, of love transforming into something darker and more terrible. The crystal statues around her cracked, spider web fractures spreading from their faces as if her grief were contagious.
When the scream finally ended, when her throat was raw and her body shaking, she carefully braided Lyra's transformed hair into her own. The light-strands hurt where they touched her darkening hair, but she welcomed the pain. It was proof. Proof that Lyra had existed. Proof that light had once lived here.
She stood, swaying slightly, and noticed something else in the rubble. A book—no, a journal. Lyra's journal, somehow intact despite the destruction. She opened it to the last entry:
*"Ora was distant at breakfast again. I wish I knew how to reach her. She thinks I don't understand her boredom, her frustration with Crysillia's perfection. But I do. I feel it too. The difference is that I believe we can change things from within, while she wants to tear it all down and start over. Maybe she's right. Maybe destruction is the only way to create something new. But I hope not. I hope there's a gentler way to transform."*
"You were wrong, little sister," Ora whispered to the absence where Lyra should have been. "There is no gentle way. There never was."
She walked through the ruins of Crysillia. Near what had been the market district, she found a small child—maybe seven years old—carefully extracting a wooden toy horse from beneath crystallized fabric. The child clutched it like it was made of gold.
"Papa made it," the child whispered. "Before. He made it for my nameday."
As she walked, she began to see other survivors. Not many—perhaps a hundred out of the hundred thousand who had called Crysillia home. They were all changed in various ways. Some had crystal growing from their flesh like terrible flowers. Others flickered between solid and translucent. When they saw her coming—this girl with darkening veins and light-absence footsteps—they fled.
She was becoming something that even the other transformed couldn't bear to be near.
Good.
If she was going to be a monster, she would be the worst monster this world had ever seen. She would be the corruption that corrupted corruption itself.
The dragons had made a mistake. They had tried to destroy Crysillia, but they had left one thing alive. One wrong thing, one broken thing, one thing that should not be.
And that thing had a name, even if she wasn't sure it was still hers.
Ora.
The last of Crysillia. The first of something else.
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*End Chapter 3*
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