Asteria remained pressed against the cooling glass of the rooftop, her breathing shallow. Below, the militia of nightmare creatures continued their rhythmic, jarring march. The sound was a discordant symphony of grinding crystals and hollow, metallic thuds.
'Just stay still,' She told herself, fingers digging into the ornamental ridges of the roof. 'They're mindless, they don't see you.'
She waited until the bulk of the Fallen procession had passed the intersection, their translucent bodies shimmering like ghosts in the fading light. Slowly, she began to move, hopping from rooftop to rooftop with minimal grace and all panic. The Palace loomed closer, its spiraling structure mocking her with familiarity.
But the air began to change.
The temperature didn't just drop; it plummeted. The "Hunger" in Asteria's chest, usually a roar of defiance, suddenly whimpered and went silent. A shadow, larger and deeper than anything cast by the glass buildings, began to stretch across the plaza.
Asteria froze, She looked up, and her [Glass Eyes] nearly shattered.
Hovering — no, existing — above the center of the militia was a nightmare that defied the laws of biology. Instinctively she knew. She knew why the creatures felt like one large entity. It was a Corrupted Terror. It looked like a mass of floating, geometric shards held together by a core of swirling, violet gravity. Dozens of long, spindly limbs made of jagged obsidian trailed beneath it — just like the Messenger she saw in her first nightmare... It didn't have a face, but as it drifted over the street, every nightmare creature below bowed its head in a wave of terrifying submissiveness.
Then, the Terror stopped.
A pulse of invisible energy rippled out of its core. The glass buildings nearby vibrated, some of them cracking instantly. Asteria felt the pulse hit her — it felt like a cold hand reaching into her chest and squeezing her heart.
The Terror's mass of shards shifted, rotating slowly until the void at its center was pointed directly at the rooftop.
"Oh... Damnation," Asteria sighed.
The Terror didn't roar. It simply dropped.
The rooftop exploded. Asteria threw herself forward, her [Lightkeeper's Guard] snapping into existence just as a shard of obsidian the size of a spear whistled past her ear. She hit the ground in a roll, glass skinning her palms, and didn't wait to look back.
"RUN!" her mind screamed.
She dove through the window of a nearby villa, the glass shattering around her. Behind her, she heard the sound of the building being systematically dismantled.
She vaulted over a glass dining table, her boots skidding on the polished floor. Outside, the militia of Fallen had broken formation, their hollow heads snapping toward her location.
'I'm the unluckiest person alive!' she internally shrieked, sliding under a collapsing archway as the Terror's obsidian limb punched through the ceiling. 'I should have gone to the tower! I should have gone South! Why is the "safe" route always a death trap?!'
She dived out a back door just as the villa folded in on itself like a house of cards. The Terror drifted over the ruins, its presence so heavy that the very air felt like lead.
Asteria darted into a narrow alleyway, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She was a flea trying to outrun a mountain. Every time she thought she had a lead, another pulse of gravity would shatter the walls around her, forcing her to lunge through windows and scramble over crumbling balconies.
She was bleeding, her breath was coming in ragged gasps, and the Palace felt a thousand miles away.
'Think, Asteria! Think!' The Terror was efficient, but it was massive. If she could get into the lower part of the city — where the buildings were packed tight and the glass was reinforced with ancient stone — she might have a chance to disappear.
She took a sharp turn, nearly losing her footing on a patch of violet blood, and headed straight for the densest part of the ruins. Behind her, the shriek of grinding glass told her the Terror was still coming, and it was getting tired of the chase.
The city had become a deathtrap, a labyrinth of razor-sharp geometry designed to shred the interloper. Asteria didn't even look back at the Terror; she knew that to gaze upon it was to invite the weight of its gravity to crush her bones.
Instead, she fought the architecture.
She vaulted over glass railings and slid down steep, translucent inclines, her [Lightkeeper's Guard] sparking as it ground against the crystalline surfaces. She wasn't fighting the horde — that would be suicide. She was racing against the very geography of the kingdom.
In her desperation, she spotted a massive, domed structure ahead. Its glass was thicker, reinforced with ancient, runic stone. 'A temple,' she thought, lungs burning. 'Gods, let there be sanctuary.'
It was the worst decision of her life.
The moment she crossed the threshold, the air didn't turn holy; it turned lethal. This was the site of the Gateway. Her way home.
And standing before the shimmering rift was the monstrosity Elara had whispered about.
It wore the tattered, petrified silk of a High Priest, but its body was a jagged spire of weeping glass. It didn't speak. It didn't pray. It simply raised a hand, and a scythe of compressed air and glass shards tore through the nave.
CRASH.
Half of the temple — centuries of sacred craftsmanship — was leveled in a single, careless swing. 'A priest destroying a house of God,' Asteria thought, diving behind a falling pillar, the irony tasting like copper in her mouth. 'How poetic. How absolutely damnable.'
She didn't stay to watch the debris settle. Scrambling to her feet, she ignored the stinging cuts on her face and arms, sprinting back out into the side streets. The sounds behind her were apocalyptic — the Terror from above and the Priest from within were turning the district into a graveyard of dust.
"The Palace," she wheezed, her vision blurring. "I have to reach the Palace."
It was the only gamble left. She burst through the grand gates of the royal estate, her boots skidding on mosaics that depicted a history she was currently trampling. She was looking for the Vault.
She summoned the [Monarch's Talisman] into her palm. It remained cold, silent.
"Work, damn you!" she hissed, darting through a long gallery.
Behind her, the sounds of the horde grew deafening. The Fallen were inside, their glass blades clicking against the walls. Asteria lunged through a set of double doors, barely pulling her trailing leg in before a serrated sword diced the air where she had been standing.
She sprinted through room after room — dining halls, ballrooms, private chambers — each one a masterpiece of glass, each one a dead end. Shards of broken windows sliced at her skin as the building groaned under the pressure of the creatures outside.
Suddenly, the Talisman in her hand gave a sharp, violent pulse.
A direction. A pull. It wasn't behind her, and it wasn't below. It was straight ahead, through a corridor lined with statues of faceless kings.
'Salvation,' she thought, a frantic, hysterical hope rising in her chest. 'Please, let it be salvation.'
She threw herself through a final set of towering obsidian doors, expecting the heavy, sealed entrance of a vault. She expected safety. She expected a fortress.
Instead, the Talisman went quiet, if only for a little while.
Asteria skidded to a halt, her chest heaving, the sounds of the pursuing nightmare creatures echoing just outside the doors. She looked up, and the breath left her body.
She hadn't found the Vault.
She was standing in the center of a vast, circular hall. Above her, the ceiling opened to the stars, and before her, atop a flight of nine glass steps, sat a throne made of a material so dark it seemed to be a hole in reality.
She was in the Throne Room. And she was completely trapped.
The throne room was a cathedral of silent, cold majesty. Massive glass pillars reached toward a vaulted ceiling that seemed to hold a trapped fragment of a midnight sky. At the far end, raised on a dais of obsidian, sat the throne. It was regal, terrifying, and looked as though it had been carved from a single block of crystallized shadow.
Asteria stumbled toward it, her boots leaving bloody smears on the polished glass floor. The [Monarch's Talisman] was no longer just humming; it was vibrating with such violence that it felt like it might shatter her palm. It spun wildly, a needle in a haywire compass, pulling her toward the center of the dais.
"Where is it?" she hissed, her voice cracking. "Where is the door?!" She pressed the talisman against the pillars, the walls, the floor — anything. She was a frantic animal, searching for a hole to crawl into before the wolves arrived. Every second of peace felt like a taunt.
CRASH.
The massive obsidian doors at the entrance didn't just open; they were detonated inward by the sheer weight of the horde. A wave of Fallen piled into the room, their glass limbs clicking and scraping, their hollow eyes fixed on the girl at the end of the hall. Behind them, the air began to vibrate — the Corrupted Terror was approaching.
"Come on! The vault is right here! It has to be!" Asteria clenched her jaw so hard her teeth ached. She didn't want to die. Not here, not alone, and certainly not like this. A wave of raw, primal terror crashed over her, but it was anchored by a desperate, ugly need to survive.
She turned and sprinted with every ounce of strength left in her battered legs. She ignored the stinging cuts and the exhaustion, her eyes locked onto the throne. It was carved with ancient, writhing symbols — serpents that seemed to move in the corner of her vision.
The Talisman practically leapt from her hand, its light turning a blinding, baleful violet. She was inches away. Her fingers reached out to touch the cold, dark stone of the seat, expecting a hidden door to swing open, expecting the sanctuary of a king's treasure room.
Her fingertips brushed the obsidian.
The world didn't open. It stopped.
The roaring of the horde, the grinding of the glass, the very air in her lungs — everything froze in a stasis of absolute silence. Then, a voice that didn't sound like a voice, but like the grinding of tectonic plates, thundered in her ears. It wasn't the gentle whisper of the Spell she was used to. It was a roar.
[Aspirant! Prepare for your second trial...!]
Asteria's eyes widened. A cold, sinking dread replaced the adrenaline. 'Shit,' she thought, the realization hitting her like a physical blow. 'That wasn't the vault.'
The throne room began to dissolve. The glass pillars turned into mist, and the floor fell away into a void of swirling stars and shattered memories. The horde vanished, replaced by a pressure so immense it felt like she was being crushed into a single point of existence.
The Spell's final words echoed through the emptiness, chilling her to the bone.
[A singular brave one... welcome to the Nightmare!]
***
hello!
i may go on small break (like one or two days woah (or i might still post tomorrow, lol) just to get the nightmare sorted and how i want to do it !!
thank you <3
Is this the end of volume 1? Is that what I call it? I don't know...