Elizabeth hung in a soundless void, weightless and Unanchored, then, in the next moment, she was no longer nowhere. She stood balanced atop a colossal, naked hand of bone, its fingers splayed in the heart of a screaming desert gale. Sand howled around her in blinding sheets. Before she could shape so much as a thought, the world itself locked in place. The roar cut off mid bellow. Countless grains of sand hung motionless in the air, resembling the scattered remnants of a shattered sky frozen in place. Then, impossibly, they began to fall the wrong way, streaming upward in reverse.
Night crashed down over the desert, swallowing the sky in one brutal instant, only to be ripped aside as dawn surged up moments later. The sun became a blazing wound dragging along the horizon in the wrong direction, and only then did she understand what was going on, the world was rewinding.
A moment later, light devoured everything.
A white so absolute it erased the very idea of Darkness burned across her vision. Even with her eyes clenched shut, there was only merciless brilliance, a cleansing radiance that seemed intent on scrubbing existence bare. It went on and on, until at last the glare thinned, ebbed, and the world seeped back into being.
Elizabeth opened her eyes to an endless ocean.
The skeletal hand beneath her had thickened with flesh and sinew, no longer dead bone but the living hand of a colossal titan rising from the depths. Humanoid, yet fundamentally not human, its sheer presence pressed on her with mingled dread and a terrible, reverent awe. A single golden eye fixed on her. The instant their gazes met, her thoughts shattered. Her mind went slack and numb, her inner voice dissolving into static, and yet some distant part of her still registered the world running backward around them. The titan alone remained unchanged, untouched, unmoving, and immutable. Everything else held frozen, except the water, which crept higher and higher until it swallowed them both.
Instinctively, she held her breath.
The titan's golden eye flinched, as though stung, and dropped its gaze to its own throat. A vast chain of gold coalesced around its neck, each link the size of houses. The titan howled. The sound that tore out of it was so immense, and so wrong that her consciousness buckled; something unseen, some barrier she hadn't known she possessed caught the worst of the blow before it could grind her mind to powder.
She shot upward, hurled through the dark like an arrow loosed from a bow.
She broke the surface with a ragged inhale. A monumental golden chain stretched away from her into the distance. Far along its length, a ship condensed from nothing: a crescent of warm, glowing gold hanging on the horizon. The chain anchored to it, one of seven, each vanishing toward its own titanic obsidian pillar spearing the sky.
The world jerked again before she could take it in. Gravity slammed back into place, and she fell. Wind tore past her as she squeezed her eyes shut.
When she opened them, she stood on the ship's deck.
Above, the sun halted mid arc, nailed into the sky. The frantic backward whirl of the world's motion eased, slowing until time felt almost normal again.
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your first trial...]
Her senses slammed back into her body all at once.
"Wha—" was all she managed before her knees hit the gleaming golden deck. She folded over and retched up a clear, tasteless liquid that steamed where it splattered. When the last of it left her, she dragged air into her lungs, shaking. Her thoughts sat misaligned, like two panes of glass almost, but not quite, overlapping.
She forced herself upright.
Fog wrapped the ship on every side, dense and unbroken, swallowing everything beyond a few paces. Through the murk she could just make out towering silhouettes in the far distance, the same obsidian monoliths she had seen bound to the titans by chains. It was little, but enough to tell her where she was.
She took a quick look at her surroundings. No shapes moved in the fog to attack her, there was no immediate threat either. Only silence and a world of grey.
Then she saw her hand and her eyes widen in surprise.
It was wrong.
Her fingers were joined by translucent webs of skin, sleek and delicate as the fins of some deep sea creature. Pale blue scales shimmered faintly along her wrist, catching and bending the faint golden light of the sun.
Panic clawed at her throat but she forced it down.
"First things first," she muttered. "Check the runes."
Calling them should have been effortless. They had received countless counseling sessions with awakened guest speakers at the academy about how to summon them, just a directed thought, a flex of will. Instead, her mind slipped, as if her thoughts were running along split roads that refused to meet. After a while she pinned the thought in place, and maintained it.
Symbols flickered into being before her, shuffled, then locked in place.
***
Name: Elizabeth
True Name: -
Rank: Aspirant
Soul Core: Dormant
Memories: -
Attribute: [Split Spirit], [Siren of the Sea], [Spirited]
Aspect: [Ocean Maiden]
Aspect Description: [a being that tend to the ocean, protect the ocean, live for the ocean, hear the voice of the ocean and is the voice of the ocean.]
***
'Of course. The cryptic kind,' she thought as she looked at her aspect in confusion.
Nothing about "Ocean Maiden" suggested combat. There were countless Aspects in this world. Most people prayed for combat Aspects, or at least those that sharpened strength, mended wounds, or pushed their fighting potential higher, as it could improve their chances of surviving, especially in their first Nightmare.
This sounded less like a weapon and more like a poetic job posting, full of devotion and duty, without a single word that hinted at power. She shoved the judgment aside. First, she needed to see what effects it had done on her before jumping to conclusion. After all, no aspect where useless.
She shifted her focus to her attributes.
[Split Spirit] Attribute Description: "Your whole body and mind are split in half. Each side can act independently."
'Oh...Wow.'
That explained more than she liked. At first, she had thought her sense of disorientation meant she was still recovering from the ordeal she had just been through, but this attribute told her otherwise.
Now that she paid attention, she realized she had been absorbing her surroundings and reading her runes at the same time, not one after another, but at the same time, like two minds working shoulder to shoulder to feed her information. The combat possibilities opened up to her, one mind could be locked into the clash, the other running wide, tracking threats, mapping exits, and plotting the next move.
But the bodily split part sounded more troublesome. Every motion felt a fraction off, like piloting herself through a delay. She had the unsettling sense of issuing two sets of commands, one to each half of her body, just to make a single action happen, something that had always been instinctive now demanded manual control.
She exhaled through her nose. There went her hard trained reflexes. Yet even as she grieved that loss, she couldn't ignore the potential of what it might become. If she lived long enough to adapt, to train this division into something seamless, the inconvenience would turn into a blade.
Time and practice. That was what it would cost. Assuming she lasted in this nightmare long enough to pay.
Her gaze slid to the next attribute.
[Siren of the Sea] Attribute Description: "Sea sirens possess unmatched beauty. Their allure draws all beings toward them. Their beauty on the outside often matches the beauty within, attracting beings who are only seeking what lies inside."
'What the hell…'
This one she liked far less, for obvious reasons.
No clean combat function presented itself. It seemed to be an attribute that enhanced her beauty which she did not need or want at the moment. The idea of her appearance being forcibly "refined" was bad enough; the line about attracting beings hunting for what lay inside her turned her stomach.
She didn't want to draw anything closer. She especially didn't want anything interested in her insides. Ominous did not described it. This attribute read like bait dressed as a blessing. She shoved the unease into a mental corner and moved on.
[Spirited] Attribute Description: "Your soul burns bright. Its fire is nearly impossible to extinguish."
"Nice. Finally, something straightforward," she muttered.
"It seems you've familiarized yourself with your abilities."
She turned her head around. Her brother stood beside her, looking casual, as if he had been there the whole time, a small, knowing smile curving his lips.
"It's rare to start with three attributes," he said. "I only had one in my first nightmare."
"So you've told me. Many times," she whispered.
His smile thinned as he looked out into the fog. "Your nightmare is turning out to be quite dreadful," he said quietly. "Worse than mine. All I had to do was survive a wave of nightmare beasts. You, on the other hand… I can't even tell. Be careful out there."
He vanished between one line and the next. At least she wished him out of existence. Now wasn't the time to be distracted. One mistake meant death.
Elizabeth looked down at herself.
She was wearing a white tunic that fell in clean lines to mid thigh, cinched at the waist with a simple belt. A small pouch rested against her hip. Sandals wrapped her feet. A dagger hung at her side in a plain sheath. Her height hadn't changed at all, still five foot eight, still tall for her age but her body felt lighter, and her center of gravity subtly moved. Faint blue scales traced along her forearms like bracelets of dim light. Her muscles had lost some of their hard edges, yet strength still coiled beneath her skin. It was Different but not diminished.
She checked the pouch.
Inside, hundreds of small, faintly glowing blue marbles clicked softly against one another. They smelled sharply, almost intoxicatingly, of seawater and kelp. Her mouth flooded at the scent; her stomach tightened in eager response.
"So that's my food," she murmured.
She plucked one out, rolled it over her webbed fingers, and placed it on her tongue. It dissolved at once, flooding her mouth with concentrated brine.
"Urgh. Too salty," she grimaced.
Still, by the time she swallowed, the hollow ache in her gut had vanished. It only took one marble, and she was full. At least she won't go hungry for a while.
She cinched the pouch closed and drew the dagger.
The hilt was wrapped in silver wire, settled into her palm as though made for it. The blade slid free with a smooth hiss. It was translucent, a pale blue like seawater frozen into glass. She extended a finger toward its edge.
Pain snapped through her fingertip before she actually touched the blade. Blood welled, a single bead of crimson falling to patter on the golden deck.
'Ah! it's really sharp—'
The thought cut off as the floor shuddered beneath her feet.
Light raced along the golden metal, bright lines flaring outward in complex runes beneath her boots. A translucent barrier of gold surged up around the ship, rising in a sweeping wall that drove the fog back like a living tide.
The ship revealed itself.
It was vast, an elegant crescent of gold that looked so soft it had to have been grown rather than forged. Patches of greenery clung to its rails and hull; vines and moss threaded through ornate carvings, as though the wild had started to reclaim even this divine metal. Beyond its prow, on the horizon, a city sprawled in impossible splendor, a metropolis of gold wrapped around seven immense obsidian pillars, each one throttled by a titanic chain like the one she had seen looped about the titan's throat.
She had just a moment to stare before a howl rolled over the world.
The sound was distant yet enormous, a thunderous bellow that vibrated in her bones.
She knew that howl. It was the titan's.
Fear shot through her like a live fire. She forced her body to move, dropping into a fighting stance; awkward, since every motion demanding dual commands to each half of her split frame, but a stance all the same.
The ship groaned and trembled, though not with the violence from before. Then, with a slow, inevitable momentum, it began to move.
Seconds bled away. Then a minute. Nothing struck or lunged at her.
Elizabeth let one mind hold the stance, every sense strained wide, while the other turned outward, cataloguing everything. The longer she watched, the more the ship's beauty slipped past the edge of her fear.
Golden arches swept along its spine, etched with runes that pulsed faintly with power. Balconies and walkways layered over one another, laced with ivy and hanging moss that glittered with moisture, as if the ocean itself had climbed aboard and taken root. Beyond, the distant city shimmered beneath the sun, so majestic and unreal that, for a moment, she could almost believe she rode one of the six gods' own vessels.
'I'm pretty sure that's the stage for this nightmare,' she thought.
Every Nightmare came with a rule, a condition to clear the trial. It could range from Surviving a swarm of nightmare beasts, killing a monster or reaching a special place. If she had to wager, her condition of passing this trial was lurking somewhere in that city.
If that was the case, she needed to go there. But first, since there was no immediate threat, she needed to learn to fight in this new body.
She drew her dagger again and closed her eyes. When she opened them, her brother stood across from her, as solid and familiar as if they were back in the training yard at home.
The corner of her mouth lifted.
"Help me warm up, yeah?"
His answering smile burned brighter, edged with pride. "Of course."