Rhys stepped out of the Argent Sanctum onto the grand crystalline balcony, took a deep breath, and grinned. The air was perfect. It tasted clean, with a hint of petrichor from the damp earth and a subtle, electric tang from the waterfalls.
"You know," he said to Liora and Theia, who followed him out like solemn shadows, "you can simulate a lot of things. Graphics, physics, haptics. But getting the smell right? That's the real sign of a premium experience."
To Liora and Theia, they were not stepping onto a balcony. They were standing at the threshold between the sacred and the manifest, breathing the first holy air of a world reborn. Every scent was a verse in the poetry of creation.
Rhys vaulted over the low crystalline barrier, landing with a soft crunch on the perfect, emerald-green grass. "Alright, let's see what we've got."
He began to walk, his hands clasped behind his back, a world-builder surveying his canvas. The two women followed, their steps light, as if afraid to mar the pristine ground.
After about twenty paces, Rhys stopped and crouched down, plucking a single blade of grass. "Hmm."
Liora immediately stiffened, her hand reaching for an imaginary sword hilt again. "Is something amiss, my Lord?"
"It's too uniform," Rhys said, rubbing the blade between his fingers. "Looks like a golf course. Good for a putting green, bad for a natural meadow." He stood up and dusted off his hands. "A real meadow needs biodiversity. It needs… texture."
He closed his eyes for a second, not in concentration, but in visualization, the way an artist pictures a brushstroke before making it. He imagined small, white-headed clovers. A few sprigs of wild thyme. The occasional, defiant dandelion. He didn't think about making them, just that they should be there.
A soft, verdant whoosh rustled through the air around them.
Theia, who was watching his feet with the focused intensity of a hawk, saw it happen. Little white and yellow flowers pushed up from the soil in an instant. Broad-leafed clover unfurled between the blades of grass. The perfect emerald carpet was now a living tapestry of greens, dotted with color.
The change wasn't just visual. The air suddenly carried the faint, sweet scent of clover and the herby fragrance of thyme.
Rhys nodded, satisfied. "Much better. See? It's the little details that sell the immersion."
Theia was already scribbling furiously in her tome, which she somehow held open without needing a surface, the pages hovering for her quill. The Progenitor walked upon his creation and found it wanting in complexity. With but a thought, he gave birth to the Herb of Fortune and the Flower of the Golden Sun, perfecting the land with his divine gaze.
They continued their walk, heading towards the river Rhys had created. The water was crystal clear, burbling over smooth grey stones.
"Looks nice, but feels a little… dead," Rhys commented, peering into the clear depths. "A body of water this big needs fish."
This time, Liora was the one to speak up, eager to contribute. "What sort of creatures shall you command into existence, My Lord? Great serpents? Mighty leviathans to guard your waters?"
Rhys chuckled. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. A leviathan in a river this small would be a logistical nightmare. No, let's start with something simple. Something tasty."
He pointed a finger at a deep pool where the river eddied. "Let's say... a school of Silver-Finned Trout."
PLINK. PLINK. SPLOOSH.
The surface of the water shimmered. Beneath it, a dozen sleek, silvery fish materialized from nothing, their scales catching the void-light. They hovered for a moment in stunned existence before instinct took over and they darted away into the current, their movements perfectly lifelike.
"And maybe a few glow-in-the-dark ones for the deep lake, just for the aesthetic," he added as an afterthought. Miles away, at the bottom of the central lake on the island, a school of ethereal, sapphire-glowing fish winked into being.
He commanded the waters to bring forth life, Theia wrote, her quill flying, and from his word, the Silver Servants were born, their glowing kin destined to illuminate the sunless depths.
They walked on. With every casual observation Rhys made, the world changed.
"Too quiet," he'd say, and the air would fill with the chirping of unseen birds and the low hum of fat, fuzzy bumblebees.
"That tree looks a bit lonely," he'd observe, and a small grove of shimmering, silver-leafed birch trees would sprout around the solitary oak.
Liora walked beside him, a tumult of emotions warring in her chest. Awe, devotion, and a gnawing sense of uselessness. He was a god of creation, of life. What use did such a being have for a knight? For a sword? Her purpose felt as empty as the void he had so casually filled. She was a weapon in a world without war.
As they reached the far side of the floating mountain, the edge of their small world, her prayers for purpose were answered in the most horrifying way possible.
The beautiful, constant waterfall that was supposed to cascade into the misty blue was sputtering. The stone at the island's edge was crumbling, not into rocks, but into a fine, grey powder. And a patch of the perfect grass, a dozen feet across, was just... gone. In its place was a patch of shimmering, television-like static.
ssss...krrr...
The sound was back. The hiss of the end.
The Bleed. It was here. On his perfect world.
"My Lord!" Liora cried out, her voice raw with panic. She instantly moved to stand in front of Rhys, her star-wrought wings flaring, casting a brilliant light as if to ward off the encroaching non-existence. "It's here! The Sanctum is being unmade!"
Theia stopped writing, her face a mask of cold terror. She clutched her tome to her chest, the only solid thing she knew besides the man she now hid behind. Her paradise, the first page of her history, was being erased before the ink was even dry.
Rhys just tilted his head. He calmly walked around the terrified Liora and peered over the edge at the patch of corrupting reality. He wasn't scared. He wasn't even concerned. He was intrigued.
"Oh, wow," he said, his voice full of genuine academic interest. "So the Unraveling isn't just a background story element. It's an active environmental hazard. It's like the Crimson from Terraria, but for existence itself."
He crouched down, waving his hand just over the shimmering static. It felt cold, with a faint, unpleasant vibration. "Look at the visual effect. It's like a broken pixel shader eating the world geometry. The sound design is great, too. That hiss is genuinely unnerving."
"Progenitor, please, we must go back!" Liora pleaded. "Your Sanctum—!"
"Don't worry," Rhys said absently, still studying the phenomenon. "It's probably just a localized issue. A spawning point for the 'corruption' mechanic." He stood up, a thoughtful expression on his face. "So, the problem is that the world has a hard edge, and that's where it's fraying. You can't just have a level end in a void. It's bad design."
He looked at Liora's glowing wings, then at the crystalline fortress shimmering in the distance. He snapped his fingers.
"You need a proper boundary," he declared. "A retaining wall. A fence."
He walked to the crumbling edge and placed a hand on the solid ground just beside the encroaching static. He closed his eyes.
Border detected, he thought, like a programmer commenting his code. Instantiate defensive perimeter.
A low, deep hum began to vibrate through the entire island. It was the same resonant chime they had heard when the Sanctum was born, but deeper, more sustained.
Liora and Theia watched, frozen in place.
From the point where his hand rested, a line of brilliant silver-white light shot out, racing along the entire circumference of the floating island. It moved at impossible speed, tracing the outer edge of their world in a perfect, glowing circuit.
When the line met itself, it erupted.
VMMMMMMMMMM!
A semi-transparent wall of shimmering, woven energy rose up from the edge of the island, climbing a hundred feet into the air before curving inwards to form a dome. It was a net of pure starlight and solidified Argent, a celestial lattice that pulsed with a gentle, protective power.
Where the new, shimmering barrier passed through the patch of Unraveling, the static screamed.
SSSKKKREEEEEEEEE!
The grey corruption was instantly, violently annihilated. The hissing sound was cut off as if by a knife. The lost ground, stone, and waterfall instantly regenerated, good as new, safely inside the glowing dome.
The whole cataclysmic event took less than ten seconds.
When it was over, their entire floating paradise was encased in a beautiful, glowing dome of energy that repelled the blue void. The soft, protective hum replaced the silence. They were safe. They were utterly and completely sealed in.
Rhys took his hand away and brushed it on his pants. "There. A nice skydome should keep the rendering errors out."
He turned and gave his two flabbergasted followers a cheerful smile. "Now, where were we? Ah yes. I was thinking this island needs a cave system."