Asteria was in darkness. The purest form of darkness. An empty void. Or at least she thought.
She didn't open her eyes, she didn't need to. Asteria was suspended within a silent, violet sphere. A familiar sun. Her Dream Core.
Below her, the rainbow-coloured chaos of her soul sea churned like a kaelidoscope of shimmering gemstones. It was beautiful yet it was almost childish. Like the days she spent daydreaming. But as she watched, she saw the 'ink' from her core seeping out, bleeding into the myriad of colours below, turning the iridescent waves into deep, bruised purples.
'This is me, isn't it?' she thought, the realization echoing in the silence. 'This mess is my soul.'
Through the violet walls of her core, she saw flashes of light – her own desires; although some of them weren't hers.
She saw the girl she used to be, sitting in a quiet garden with a plate made up of scraps she and her mother could scavenge for. She saw a version of herself that was safe, anonymous and normal. This was her own heart – small, safe and still human.
Then, her vision shifted.
She felt her own blood pulse, her Dream Core trembling too. [Heir of Dreams]. That was the problem that caused this.
Her "desire" changed. The garden didn't just grow; it expanded until the trees brushed the stars, until the food didn't satisfy her; it only made her hungrier, greedier. She saw herself sitting on a throne made of obsidian and beneath her feet, the world wasn't her home anymore – it was a feast for "her" insatiable hunger.
She saw the "Changing Star" and the "Legacy Caster" not as her academic rivals, but as flickering candles waiting to be snuffed out so she can devour their light.
She saw the world below, her mother, her friends at school, her peers. She saw the outskirts "city" she lived in. She saw the entire NQSC that was out of her grasp. She saw the entire country. She saw the world. She saw the stars. All of it was calling to her, waiting to be devoured; to finally satiate her hunger.
'No,' Asteria whispered, her spectral form trembling. 'That isn't what I want. I don't want to eat the world, I just wanted peace... and a private bathroom... '
A rhythmic, skittering sound filled the sphere.
From the deepest parts of her mind, a thousand golden threads descended. The threads were held by eight impossibly long arms, the fingers bristling against her soul sea. They weren't the suffocating threads of the Messenger in her first nightmare, but they were impossibly vast. They pulsed with the logic of [Arachnid's Gaze].
The hands holding the threads began to weave them throughout her desires, stitching the "Outskirts rat" and the "Queen of Nightmare" together into a jagged, uncomfortable mosaic.
"Is this home?" A voice asked, distant and almost childlike; yet filled Asteria's ears with a harrowing sense of dread and fear. It was her flaw, [The Call]. It was her own voice, distorted through a cracked mirror within the violet sphere. "You asked for help, little bird. You asked for strength to survive. To keep up your charade to save yourself from humiliation. Why do you weep now that the cage has been opened?"
"This isn't home," Asteria hissed, reaching out to tear the golden threads trying to bind her and the desires that didn't belong to her. "My home is the outskirts. Home is the smell of dust and the sound of rain on a tin roof. This... this is just another nightmare..." She continued, nearly choking on her own tears.
The violet sphere vibrated. The voice didn't argue. It just leaned in closer, the warmth of corruption turning into a suffocating heat.
"You are the Seventh's child, Asteria. You are the silence that follows the void. Eat your fill, Child of the Progenitor. Consume the dream until there is nothing left to hurt you."
Suddenly, her eyes became clear, clearer than they ever were. As if someone wiped the glass they were made of after a storm.
The violet walls of her core turned eerily transparent, and she saw the "real world" outside of her soul sea through the fog of her faint.
She saw a sterile white room. She felt a cold pressure of a cuff on her arm. And sitting by her bed, illuminated by the moonlight, was the silver-haired girl. Nephis.
Nephis wasn't looking at Asteria's face, though. She was looking at the air above her chest, her pale eyes wide with an expression Asteria had never seen before on the "Changing Star" facade before.
It was recognition. It was pity.
'Does she know I'm being eaten alive?' Asteria's face turned somber, then quickly into a snarl. 'I don't need your pity, Changing Star. Don't you have better things to do than sit by a rat's bed who had nothing to do with you?!' Asteria clenched her jaw, gritting her teeth against one another. 'I offer nothing, yet you dare sit by and stare at me with those eyes? Do I look helpless to you?'
Seemingly, her anger clouded her eyes once more. She couldn't see the real world. But the anger at seeing someone pity her still remained.
A figure materialized next to her, only this time the figure wasn't a shadowy outline cloaked in a dark mantle. This time it was open.
The figure had eight nimble arms like a spider which were still holding the golden threads, and wore a dark mantle and a harrowing, nebulous, polished wooden mask concealing their features, horns protruding from the head, the mouth like a snarl of a hound.
"Did you find what you wished for, child of the forgotten?" The harrowing voice sounded from beneath the mask, a cacophony of one thousand prayers and one thousand whispers.