The drift's internal structure accelerated, the crystalline mass rotating faster and faster, growing more violent by the second, and Ashe could already sense the lunge coming.
Glass-like extensions shot forward, forcing her to throw herself sideways, hitting the ground and rolling behind the cover of a collapsed wall to her right. The extensions slammed into the stone where she had been standing moments earlier, leaving deep fractures across its surface. She pressed her back against the broken wall and breathed hard, listening to the sounds the drift made as it repositioned itself. It was accelerating again.
Another burst came a second later, and the wall she had been using as cover exploded apart under the impact. One of the extensions struck her across the shoulder while another grazed the left side of her torso. Pain immediately tore through her as she stumbled forward and caught herself against the opposite wall.
Regaining her balance, she turned and faced the drift directly. The fear was gone now. There was no self-preservation instinct kicking in, no need to hide anymore. It was just the anger toward something that wanted to end her for no apparent reason at all.
The moment stretched until the drift suddenly broke apart. Its body shattered into dozens of shard-like fragments that spread across the entire area, surrounding her from every direction until there was nowhere left for her to move. All Ashe could see was a fractured sphere of shards encircling her, their sharp edges catching the light while distorted reflections of her appeared across their surfaces.
At that exact moment, Cral extended its arm toward them and everything stopped. Nothing visible had come from it, yet the shards halted instantly, each fragment trembling as though pushing against an invisible barrier it could not cross. And Ashe was at the center of it, breathing carefully and looking at Cral in an attempt to understand what it was doing. There was no visible strain in its action, no urgency to either attack or protect. If anything, it almost felt as though it was trying to show her something, or rather waiting for her to look closely enough until something revealed itself. Could that be its intention? And if so, what was she supposed to understand from something for which she had no frame of reference at all?
Suddenly, the shards rotated and the formation reorganized itself into a fractured plane that hovered for just a moment in front of her. Then, a few moments later, the plane came forward and engulfed her entirely. She had no time to move at all before the edges of it reached her, and then there was nothing.
—
The place she arrived in had no clear dimensions. Blackness extended in every direction, and through it drifted broken shards of the same material the drift had been made of.
Soon after, the shards moved again and the space around Ashe changed with them until she realized she was standing inside some kind of projection. Lethon stretched around her from every angle, only this wasn't the ruined city she knew, overtaken by vegetation and decay. This was Lethon alive. A city still functioning, lit from within and above, with structures that rose to such heights that the ruins felt small and almost insignificant by comparison.
Then, in the distance, a wave of light appeared. It moved rapidly through the projection, crossing the city with an overwhelming destructive force. Everything it touched ceased to exist, swallowed within seconds until all that remained behind was just an irregular landscape of stone and ash.
As the wave rushed closer, Ashe instinctively raised her arms in front of her face in a defensive gesture. When she finally lowered them, she realized she was not alone anymore. A figure stood perhaps four meters in front of her, humanoid in shape, its body made of a translucent flowing substance that moved continuously, like water. Ashe sensed no aggression from it. Nothing that resembled the drift from before.
She knew drifts were emergents who had failed to stabilize, their bodies decaying into reactive matter. In that state they were no longer capable of reason. Technically still alive, perhaps, but with nothing recognizably human left inside them anymore. But this was something more than that. This was the last fragment of consciousness the decay had failed to erase, preserved within whatever this place was, cut off from the body it had once belonged to and from the outside world entirely.
Ashe couldn't explain how she knew any of it, but within this space it all felt instinctively clear. She stepped closer, then slowly reached out until her hand rested against the figure's shoulder. Filaments emerged from her palm, spreading through the figure's body in fine branching lines. They carried the same structure she had seen in the walker core, in the device at the shop, and beneath her own skin when the corruption spread. It all felt deeply familiar, and yet she couldn't remember why. Couldn't explain any of it.
Was this what Cral had wanted her to see? Did it even know?
The figure began to dissolve slowly. The light concentrated within its form spread as it broke apart, filling the surrounding space and growing brighter in every direction. Ashe closed her eyes against it.
—
When her senses returned, she realized her arm was extended forward. Opening her eyes, she found herself staring at the drift's blue-white core from less than a meter away, while her fist was buried inside it. The core had stopped rotating, and the light within it flickered weakly before going out entirely. Seconds later, pieces began to fall away from the drift's structure, detaching one by one and turning to dust in front of her.
She eventually withdrew her hand, and for a while all she could do was breathe and wait for the chaos in her mind to settle. Then, she looked at Cral.
Now that the drift had fully disintegrated, the automaton moved again, stepping slowly toward her. Ashe no longer knew what to make of this… being. If anything, the entire experience had left her understanding Cral even less than before. And yet, whether from exhaustion or some irrational sense of hope, she decided to let things unfold on their own.
Cral raised its hand and held it above the cut on her shoulder without making direct contact. Filaments spread from its palm, the same kind Ashe had seen emerge from her own hand moments earlier. She pulled back instinctively when they touched her skin, but then forced herself to stay still. Gradually, the sting of the wound faded until she could barely feel it at all.
"I still think you're strange," she said quietly, gritting her teeth.
Cral didn't answer. It continued working attentively, unaffected by the comment at all.