Out of Evenfall (BOOK 1)

Chapter 25

ADARA

In the dark emptiness of the twilight, she opened her eyes to the silver moonlight. Wings echoed across the ocean of dancing stars, carrying the wish of evenfall across the void, scattering it with purple flames of a titan-sized, yet unseen bird. Silver leashes fell to join the bouncing stars which skittered across her grimy boots and shed the light on the crimson. Adara took a step forward through the stillness of water as the silver colors spread out with each movement, and the endless, twilight sea burst to life.

From black to silver blue, the expanse sped ahead of her with no land in sight. Frozen among the night sky, she jumped at a voice which disturbed the water.

"I have come, Adara of the Anima."

A faint mist grew out of the silver streams. Another ghost. White flecks shivered off their hazy body. Adara lifted her arm up to her brow. "Who are you?" Another, horrible thought strangled her and disturbed the dancing stars around her. "Where am I? Am I dead?"

The strange image tipped their head with a soft laugh which rustled the endless twilight sea. "You have many questions, Adara," they whispered, soft against her skin. "I can say you are not dead. As for who I am..." They stretched out her arms, and the stars among them gathered closer into shivered energy. "I am everything yet nothing. I am the light and the dark. I am all that you can see, and everything you cannot. I am magick. I am life and death." Their hands wrapped around themselves before moving in a steady circle around her. "I am the past." They shifted into Garren, gaze full of iron. "The present." Jisa formed from the mist, solid and in existence. Adara refrained from racing for her when the spirit changed. "I am also the future untold."

The hazy image returned, but something about it was familiar, along with the voice they took on. Dark hair and spiralling green galaxies which reflected off the sea at their feet. "You may consider me the spirit of this crystal," they said with his voice. "As for where you are... you are on the umbral plane, where all the worlds meet into the chaos of the echoes. Where everything began, and everything must end."

"Why?" Adara rasped out. "I-I was here with another. Jisa!" Panic shook the sea with great waves. "Where is she?"

"I have taken you into the crystal to protect you — but it is a fleeting shield, for my power is spent. Your companion, Jisa... she gave her power to me, and for that, I will repay the toll." The spirit's formless face almost curled up into a sad smile. "Time shall continue onward."

"I need to go back!" Adara insisted through the silver storm. "We were getting attacked by Derelicts!"

The familiar image fell back to the formless spirit. "I feel deep of the world's imbalance, the last crimson dusk left your kind in the apocalypse of the obscura creatures." They pointed to the void. "You feel it too, Adara of the Anima, though you do not know it. You, who was born connected to the flow, more so than one who can see the echoes. You affect it on a level very few will ever know. Let me unblock the flow within your mind, so you can have back what was taken from you."

"What was taken from me?" Adara frowned at the spirit as the moon rose over the glass horizon with the tolling of the bells, a softer, but no less powerful song to the dissonance she left behind in her reality. Wings flapped between the stars with flaming purple feathers. "What would that be? And what do you mean unblock the flow?" Adara waved her hands as the stars met in the center of the horizon. "I just... I don't understand what's happening to me, what's happening around me." Her breath caught in her chest as the spirit came closer, shifting back to the future untold. "I just need things to make sense." Tears dropped down her cheeks as she tried to swallow all the pain of the past.