Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

We are Legion

She was surrounded by darkness: darkness so profound that it seemed as if she had never been able to see in her entire life, darkness that.... That was less like darkness because darkness assumed the absence of light, this assumed the light had never existed to begin with and never would exist.

The experience in itself was jarring, disturbing beyond all things she had ever seen in her life on Anin. As a creature of light she was consumed by this absence, unable to fight it. her mind spiraled jabbering further into madness than she would have been able to go on her own.

And then.

Light.

At least kind of.

When she opened her eyes she could suddenly see herself, her hands and her body as if she was standing under some sort of illumination, though when she looked around there was no source. Outside of herself, everything was black. She didn't get the sense of there being walls a ceiling, this was not a room but, a black void of some sort. The only thing that seemed even remotely familiar was the floor under her feet. Or perhaps floor was not entirely accurate either.

Unlike everything else the floor interacted with light, and she could see a dim sort of reflection on the floor around her feet, which vanished where the wall of blackness took the floor out of sight. When she flexed her feet, the floor rippled, and when she took a step those ripples spread disrupting the surface until she realized that she was standing in a shallow pool of water, water so shallow that it didn't even touch the tops of her feet, but whatever kind of liquid she was standing in was completely black.

She turned in a nervous circle looking for anything, signs of life or otherwise.

But she found nothing.

She walked forward towards the wall of blackness, but as she walked the blackness receded.

Her footsteps sloshed gently through the puddle of water, casting ripples in a wide circle around her. She continued to walk, but it seemed as if she just stood in the same spot because every step took her no further from this place, and no closer to anything she recognized.

However she did not grow frustrated.

Anything was better than that pure blackness she had experienced before.... More like an undoing of herself than it was the absence of light. She would rather walk forever through this void than go back to whatever that was,

She paused, and looked down into the water, surprised to find that she did not have a reflection, instead what she saw was a dark mirror looking in on another world much like the one she stood in, but this one....

This one had figures in it.

Kazna knelt down in the water, so similar to the temperature of the air that it was hard to even tell the difference. When her hands touched the surface, they seemed to sink through, and she jolted forward. On the other side of the reflection, dark shadows turned to look at her.

Their great looming shapes scared her, caused her heart to go catering inside her chest. She wanted to pull away and run, but pride stopped her cold. She was not a child to simply be sent running at every shadow.

No she was a warrior and she would behave as such.

She steeled herself and pressed her hands harder downward until she felt them burst through the other side. Her arms continued to sink, until they were up to her elbows, and then her chest.

She turned her face to the side feeling as the strange substance enveloped her, holding her breath as she vanished below the surface of the dark mirror. For a horrible moment she thought she was going to be stuck, entombed inside the border between places.