The Tower loomed over the tangled silhouette of the Last City. Impossibly tall, it split the luminous night sky into two halves, its black outline visible as an emptiness, a void of missing stars. No lights pocked its surface, and what few sparks glowed in the Escherian disorder of buildings below it were not powerful enough to cast onto its monolithic sides.

She knew she was dreaming. It was not the first time she’d dreamed of this Tower.

In the crystalline vault above, unfamiliar stars glittered, cold and dispassionate. Streaked across them, a smudge like spilled yellow sand: the broken remnants of a moon, its shattered body spilling its regolithic innards behind it, mortally wounded.

Overhead, an almost-familiar cluster of stars pulsed with the flicker of lights seen through distorted heat waves. They were sisters, she remembered. Sister stars. Her eyes were pulled to them, her attention flickering inevitably back to those sisters: it was a premonition, a demand to be witnessed. Something was coming. Something was about to happen.

One by one, each diamond sister star dimmed, and then was snuffed. In their place, an intolerable blackness, darker than the shadow of the Tower. An emptiness, like a hole punched through the vault of heaven.

Dread crept up her body and back down her limbs.

At the distant horizon, a searing fire crept over the ragged outline of the City that formed the horizon. An arc like molten orange liquid spilled across the rooftops and finally reached the Tower, showing it to be as basaltic black as its silhouette had implied. The sun that was rising over the edge of the City was exhausted and old, orange rather than white, illuminating like the dying embers of a fire.

The sunlight struck her eyes at last, and she woke.