The sun vanished, and with it, the vibrant warmth of the valley was extinguished as if a candle had been snuffed by a giant's breath. The blinding white emptiness returned, a sensory vacuum that made Asteria feel like she was floating in an ocean of milk.
Then, the white began to bruise.
Deep purples and sickly, shadowed indigos bled into the void, forming the carved outlines of a world in mourning. Asteria found herself standing in the center of a cathedral that was not yet finished. It was a skeletal thing of rough obsidian and cold marble, lacking the golden veneers and the toll of the chime.
Outside, the sky was an open wound. The artificial sun Halesia had attempted to hoist into the heavens was flickering, throwing out erratic, violent bursts of radiance followed by long, terrifying stretches of pitch-black silence.
Asteria saw the Queen.
Halesia was no longer the grieving girl on the cliffside, nor the radiant Goddess on the throne. She looked like a woman who had been hollowed out by her own ambition. Her hair was disheveled, her white robes stained with the soot of a failing civilization. She was kneeling in the center of the unfinished nave, her forehead pressed against a floor that was slick with her own blood where she had clawed at the stone.
"You promised," Halesia rasped, her voice cracking. "Father... you said we would be safe."
She was praying to the god she had loved – the Lord of Light – the Sun God. But the silence that answered her was absolute. Above the open roof of the cathedral, the "sun" gave one final, agonizing pulse and...
A scream went up from the city below. It wasn't a scream of pain, but of pure, existential terror. The sound of thousands of people realizing they were trapped in a lightless grave.
"He isn't listening," a voice whispered.
"The God of the Sun has no eyes for those who hide beneath the earth, Halesia," Valerius said, his voice devoid of hope. "The people are tearing each other apart in the streets. They are burning the furniture just to see each other's faces. The chaos has begun." But his last words shook Halesia more than anything could.
"We have been abandoned, my Queen."
Halesia stood up slowly. Her movements were jerky, like a puppet with tangled strings. "If the Light will not have us, then what about something in the dark?"
"There is nothing in the dark but hunger," Valerius warned.
"No," Halesia whispered, her eyes wide and glassy. "There's always something."
She walked toward the center of the dais, where a fissure had opened in the ground – a crack that seemed to lead into an infinity deeper than the earth itself.
The air from the fissure felt like home. Like a parent cradling their child. Like something deep within her flesh and marrow was waking up from an endless, beautiful dream.
Halesia knelt before the crack. She didn't clasp her hands. she spread them wide, as if inviting a predator to strike.
"I call upon the one who was alongside the Light," she intoned, her voice vibrating with a frequency that made Asteria's ghostly form flicker. "The one who was Forgotten." She paused for an unsettling second. "If you give my people peace, I will give you their waking lives."
For a long time, nothing happened. The only sound was the distant, muffled roar of the rioting city.
Then, the shadows in the room began to move. Not like shadows cast by light, but like ink dropped into water. They swirled and thickened, rising from the corners of the room and pouring out of the fissure.
A presence manifested. It had no face, no limbs, only a vast, suffocating weight that made Asteria feel like she was being buried alive in a basking warmth of affection.
It was the the progenitor of her lineage – of her corruption.
It didn't speak with words; it spoke with images that flashed through Asteria's mind: a sea of glass, a field of silent flowers, a world where no one ever had to choose because no one ever had to wake.
"My kingdom is crumbling," Halesia sobbed, reaching into the darkness. "My sun is broken. Give me something that will never fade. Give me a light that doesn't need the sky."
The entity shifted. A hand – or something resembling one, made of starlight and smoke – emerged from the void and touched Halesia's heart.
Asteria watched, paralyzed, as the golden spark within Halesia began to change. The pure, solar energy was being twisted. It turned from a warm yellow to a cold, piercing gold-red – the colour of a dying star.
"The price is your heart," the entity's presence thrummed. "To dream forever, they must forget the truth of the world. They must become part of my dream. You will be their anchor, and they will be your echoes."
"I accept," Halesia whispered.
In that moment, the first tolling of a chime was born.
It wasn't a bell. It was the sound of the Forgotton's willpower slamming into the foundations of Aethelgard. The ripple of sound moved through the cathedral, through the streets, and into the minds of every living soul in the valley.
Asteria saw the effect instantly. Through the open roof, she saw the riots stop. The screaming died away, replaced by a terrifying, heavy silence. The fires in the streets didn't go out, but the people stopped fighting them. They simply sat down where they were, their eyes glazing over, their faces relaxing into that same sickly, peaceful smile Asteria had seen in the Vault.
The chime began to build the glass. Asteria watched as the stone of the cathedral began to shimmer, turning translucent. The rough edges of the world were being smoothed over by the endless, addictive slumber.
Halesia stood at the center of the transformation, her eyes turning into the ocean-blue shards of the Queen Asteria knew. She wasn't weeping anymore. She wasn't human anymore. She was the first piece of glass.
"It's beautiful," Halesia murmured, her voice now layered with a thousand echoes. "They aren't afraid anymore. Look, Valerius. They're finally happy."
Valerius stepped into the light of the new, corrupted Spark. He looked at the Queen, and for a second, Asteria saw a flash of absolute horror in his eyes – the realization that they hadn't saved the kingdom, they had simply preserved its corpse.
But then, the chime hit him.
His shoulders relaxed. His brow unfurrowed. The horror in his eyes died, replaced by a dull, loyal shimmer. He knelt at her feet.
"Yes, Your Majesty," he said, his voice a perfect, hollow chime. "It is paradise."
Asteria tried to reach out, to shake him, to scream that this was the moment the nightmare began, but the shadows of the vision swirled around her, pulling her back into the white void.
She saw the Queen turn toward her – or rather, toward the space she occupied. For a split second, the sapphire eyes of the Queen seemed to pierce through the vision, looking directly at the rat from the future.
"You see, little one?" the Queen's voice echoed. "I gave them what the Light refused. I gave them a dream that lasts forever. Why do you insist on waking them up?"
The darkness surged, and the vision of the broken cathedral shattered into a billion pieces of black glass.