The desert had a way of erasing time, but for the first time since her arrival in the dream realm, Asteria felt as though she was the one doing the erasing.
She moved across the white dunes with a rhythmic, tireless gait. A full day had passed since she left the Hollow Oak, and it was largely peaceful — except for the blistering heat and the sweat stuck to her skin. Though, a positive was that the difference in her condition was night and day. Gone was the staggering, delirious girl who had crawled through the sand. In her place was a young woman whose skin had been tempered by the sun and growing muscles that could almost move with the grace of a mountain cat.
Every few hours, she would summon [Oasis' Greed]. The small wooden crate would materialize from white sparks, and the sound of [Siren's Blessing] — a faint trickling of water — was the most beautiful music she had ever heard within this barren wasteland.
She took a long, measured sip from a stone bowl she prepared inside the crate, feeling the cool liquid revitalize her. She reached into the crate, checking the "fuel" for the memory — as she could not manipulate soul essence, yet. One of the Awakened shards she had harvested from the Sand-Eaters was growing slightly dimmer, its essence slowly being drained to keep the water flowing and her remaining worm-meat fresh.
'A fair trade,' Asteria thought, dismissing the memory. 'Power for life.'
It did dawn on her though, that Soul Shards were a valuable currency in the world, yet she was using them like they were nothing.
'All this money going to waste...' She lamented.
She checked her runes. [Spell Fragments: 84/1000]. The number taunted her. She needed more. She needed a slaughter.
The change in atmosphere happened in mere seconds.
The air, previously still and oppressive, began to hum. It wasn't a sound — not quite — but a vibration that rattled her teeth. Her [Glass Eyes] caught the shift first — the horizon didn't just shimmer with flawless sand anymore. It was flowing, in a deadly yet mesmerizing dance.
A wall of white, miles wide and what looked like thousands of feet tall, was screaming towards her from the west.
"You've got to be kidding me." Asteria hissed.
She didn't run. Where was she supposed to hide?
Instead, she dropped into a low crouch, burying her feet deep into the sand for a semblance of stability. She decided to summon [Lightkeeper's Guard], the armour snapping into place as the first wave of the storm hit.
It was an apocalypse of white.
The wind didn't just blow; it hammered. Hard. Asteria felt like she was being scoured by a billion tiny needles. The sand was so fine it seeped into her pores; whilst simultaneously being so thick she couldn't see her hand in front of her. She closed her eyes, to protect them from the barrage of grains and to focus on her other senses to maintain her orientation. The ground beneath her was shifting, the dunes she had just climbed where being leveled and rebuilt in real-time. It was as if the desert was a living thing, tossing and turning in a fit of restless sleep.
She stayed in that crouch for what felt like hours, her breathing shallow through the filter of her armour. The roar of the wind was deafening, a mindless howling rage that threatened to strip her flesh from her bones.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the screaming stopped.
Asteria stood up, crawling out from the heaps of sand piled on top of her, holding her breath to stop herself from swallowing or breathing in sand. She shook off the mass of kilograms of sand that had piled up on top of her. She coughed, clearly her lungs and looked around.
The world had been rearranged. The massive dunes that had dominated the landscape were gone, replaced by a flat, sunken basin. And there, revealed by the storm's violent hand, was a sight that made her heart stop.
"Elara... you undersold it." Asteria whispered.
Before her lay the outskirts of a city. But it wasn't made out of stone or wood. It was made out of glass.
Spires of the purest, most translucent crystals rose from the sand, catching the afternoon sun and refracting it into a thousand rainbow-coloured daggers. There were miniature palaces with domed roofs that looked like giant soap bubbles frozen in time. Stone courtyards surrounded them, carved with intricate mosaics of stars and constellations that seemed to glow with a faint, inner light.
Most of the structures were in nearly pristine condition, protected for centuries beneath the insulating weight of the sand. They were beautiful, cold and profoundly alien.
Asteria began to walk down what used to be a main thoroughfare. Her boots clicked against the glass pavement, the sound echoing through he unnerving silence of the ruins. She felt like an intruder in a dream. This was the Citadel — or at least, the entrance to it.
But as she moved deeper into the residential district, the beauty began to bleed into decay.
In the center of a cluster of pristine glass villas sat a singular, jarring anomaly.
It was a large, rectangular building — perhaps a library or a communal hall — but it was in a state of violent collapse. Great fissures ran through its crystal walls, and the stone foundation was crumbling into fine grey dust even as she watched. It was as if the sand had been the only thing holding the structure together, and now that it had been exposed to the air, it was dying — just like she was a month prior.
Asteria slowed her pace, her [Glass Eyes] narrowing. The violet ink within her soul sea began to churn, a warning signal she had learnt to implicitly trust.
"Something's wrong with that one," She murmured, her hand drifting to her side to summon the [Obsidian Glass].
She crept closer, her footsteps light against the glass beneath her boots. As she peered through one of the jagged cracks in the building's side, she saw movement.
It wasn't the slow, rhythmic movement of the Sand-Eaters she was used to. This was something different.
Inside the crumbling hall, dozens of creatures were coiled around pillars. They were worms, but unlike she had ever seen. They were nearly transparent, their bodies looking like liquid glass. She could see their internal organs — pulsing, neon-violet sacs — and a nervous system that shimmered like a spiderweb of electricity.
They didn't have skin; they had a shifting, crystalline carapace that reflected the ruins around them. To a normal human eye, they would have been almost invisible against the glass walls of the city.
But Asteria wasn't normal.
Her eyes locked onto the largest one, a beast that was easily eight meters long, draped over a fallen chandelier. Its "head" was a cluster of glass needles that vibrated at a frequency that made her head ache.
One by one, the transparent worms stopped their squirming. The vibration of the leader intensified. they didn't have eyes, but they each turned their heads in unison towards the crack were she stood.
They had tasted her essence. They had smelled the "Hunger" she carried.
The ground began to thrum. A deep, low rumble started in the foundation of the ruined building and spread out into the glass streets beneath her heels. The crumbling hall groaned as the worms began to detach themselves from the pillars, their bodies clicking like a thousand breaking mirrors.
Asteria didn't retreat. She felt the familiar, cold surge of Hunger in her chest. Her stomach growled — not with the need to eat, but with the desire for the essence trapped inside those glass bodies.
She drew the [Obsidian Glass], the dark. light-drinking glass of the weapon providing a sharp contrast to the shimmering world around her. She took a deep breath, a predatory smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
"Well," She began, her voice cutting through the rumbling silence. "This isn't exactly a warm welcome, is it?"
The lead worm let out a screech that shattered the remaining walls of the hall, and the horde charged.