A lone girl dressed in rags and bandages stood atop a high mountain cliff. Her long dark hair danced in the burning midnight wind. She was looking down – far, so far – through dark clouds raining melted glass, to the base of the mountain, where an army like no other was taking shape.

They were millions of them, all of various shapes or sizes but similarly all beings infected by a wicked god. Maybe if the girl went down, she would recognize some of them; she was bound to… She had to kill an old baker she’d visited back at the academia of magic not long ago. They were no longer the people she knew; they were simple puppets she had to kill to protect her dreams.

She wanted to allow a tear to escape her eye but even this was impossible because of the heat of this planet. She took a deep breath, not that there was any oxygen, and pulled on a brown cloth tied around her left wrist. It instantly changed into an exquisite glaive taller than herself and made from dark metal. Three golden rings ornated the flat of the weapon with each having a lonesome band of fabrics of different colors: blue, red, and green.

She allowed her hands to glide across the shaft which had painted white fish swimming around. The girl looked behind herself, her green eyes were filled with worry for her friends that were resting next to a temple made of luminous stone. They deserved their rest after everything she made them go through.

For a moment, she imagined them corrupted like the abomination down below. In her mind, they got up and entered the temple and she was left powerless hearing the screams of the one she had to protect. She wanted to scream and cleave them right there where they rested so such a vision would never happen but managed to stop herself. She wiped the accumulated sweat over her sickly white skin with a shaking hand and turned her back on her friends.

She closed her eyes and listened to the nostalgic tune her master was playing on a simple flute she had made her. The girl opened her eyes and changed her dress in an instant. She was now wearing black metallic armor with white laces of flowers covering her exposed skin. Her hair was tied with a long blue ribbon exuding soft butterflies of light.

Breathing in the delicate light cast by the seven fragmented moons in the sky, she finished her transformation: flowers bloomed around her, four ghostly tails appeared behind her, her shadow expanded, and ephemeral crystals appeared far and wide out of nothingness. With her power stretched to its limit, a maximum she was constrained to after succeeding in a tiresome ritual, she began running down the mountain.

She broke through the clouds in an instant as her body melted into a bird made of burning petals. She was moving many hundreds of meters every second as the broken world she was in flashed by her. Her foes were almost in front of her, and she reformed back to her original body, her heels digging into the molten ground, and with the glaive at the ready slashed at the first monster she could.

The irony of possibly knowing them… She did know who he was in the past; a good man who built many orphanages during the war…

Her blade cleaved him without hesitation and a shockwave was produced which spread many kilometers of destruction. Organs and body parts rained down on the monsters who were caught off guard.

Those who were still able to keep their consciousness were turned into weapons by the awful gods behind this hell. They cried and moaned understanding the girl would kill them and free them from their eternal torment while the mindless abomination screeched while wielding such weapons.

With a background of laments, the girl lifted her weapon high. She commended the soft moonlight and starry sky which came down as divine projections. She beckoned those projections to mix with her expanded shadow; they mixed with one another until a bestial scream was produced with the rise of the girl’s most trusted summon.

A shadowy snake with starry wings arose and called down a rain of miniature stars. With fiery balls descending to kiss the earth, the abominations embraced the heat and clashed with the stars; those ever changing, ever adapting, ever fighting… they simply welcomed this attack which worried the girl.

She had to kill them all as fast as she could or else, they might reach the mountain’s top. Looking deeper in their ranks, she noticed fleshy sunflowers birthing more creatures: she needed to destroy them to not be overwhelmed.

The girl looked at her summon – it knew what she wanted without her having to say it – and jumped into the bloody fray where the girl danced like a fairy of death.

❀

How many days went by, she didn’t know. She simply fought like an undying asura. She consumed the rotting, twisting, and disgusting flesh of those she killed while infected as many of them with a plethora of flowers she would later use like weapons.

Whenever some monsters would try to climb the mountain, she would turn her glaive into a celestial bow and shoot at them a fractal illusion that melted their soul. When they grouped up too tightly to overwhelm her, she would form a white metallic fan able to create jet-like winds mixed with lustrous ink filled with endless curses. When a foe she couldn’t cut presented itself, she simply made a dagger able to cut the fabric of reality.

She healed any wound and dispersed into petals when she was too deep in the enemy’s line. As time went by, she managed to make her own army of shadowy summons, dancing petals, and scouting butterflies. She was bordering godhood on this battlefield.

Seeing she was almost in reach of the sunflowers, she detached her right arm which morphed into an eldritch beast that was akin to a hound whose real form couldn’t be perceived. She jumped on its back while changing her weapon into a crystal sword of which gems came out as they recreated the stars the girl used to know. As above, so below; this was something she was only starting to understand and use. Even if her understanding was partial, it was more than needed to deal with the aberrations.

Of those crystalline stars, lights were refracted and created thousands of worlds all as mysterious as the last which entrapped small pockets of aberrations.

Then, the beast wrapped reality around itself to enter another plane of existence which it used to stride toward the fleshy flowers in an instant. With her destination reached, the girl created a thousand devouring maws around her which cleanly consumed the flower as well as dug a hole deep as the eye could see.

She was completely exhausted but with all of that, there wouldn’t be any more reinforcement. But as she closed her eyes while above the chasm she had just created, a godly presence manifested above a large pile of corpses. It was just the will of a powerful being. Nonetheless, it managed to drain the blood from every dead and created with this red river a giant whose head reached the clouds and blessed with a permanent energy source equating to that of a sun’s heat. An immortal god was thus created from simple rabbles.

She had been had. The fight she thought ended was only really just starting. If only she hadn’t done a tiresome ritual just before… Even then, she would still be the one losing whether she was at her strongest or not.

The girl opened her eyes once again and looked at the sky – those things which no one should be looking at were getting closer. Maybe a year or even less was left for those beasts born from the death of Achernar. Truth be that most stars were long dead and only their traveling light still proved they existed. Yet the fact remained that the girl wondered whether fighting was even worth it at this point.

Maybe if she was to die here, the god who created the giant would defile her corpse and create a monstrosity able to cleave a moon in half… With all that strength, she would be able to defeat those approaching nebulous monsters; at the same time, she would cause the death of those she cared for. That wasn’t something she could allow.

Taking out of her dress a bundle of paper, she signed them in her blood, and a moment before the heavy fist of the giant could take her life, disappeared. It was better to sign a deal with an old god than do nothing and die.

❀

The girl reappeared back inside the luminous temple above the clouds. On her right was someone just like her but with the exception of having blue eyes like the calm sky she hadn’t seen in a long time, that girl even longer.

This person was brought back to existence during the ritual… Their form was still not anchored with reality and this might take some time, yet the girl who was wounded and covered in gore simply smiled. She was happy as this was something she worked so hard to accomplish: reviving her most important person…

She asked her revived friend, “Did you sleep well?” but the other only responded with a mechanical nod. The two talked with one another – not that it was much of a conversation, just one talking and the other nodding. But for the wounded girl, this was more than she ever dreamed of.

She kept blabbering, “I wanted to see you so much that I was scared to forget your peaceful eyes or calming voice. I fought so much, I did so much, I suffered so much, all to see you again.”

The other girl responded by having a single tear sliding down her cheek. It was impossible to say whether she was happy or sad as her face was frozen stiff.

“Let me tell you all about it. I’ll teach you about the worlds that I saw. I’ll sing you the plight of those I met. I’ll describe to you the places I traveled… please, let me talk about the life I had so that you’ll still know who I am even if I changed…”

And so started the girl with how the two of them escaped together, and how they were separated.

At that time, they were still slaves stuck inside a dark tower; a time when the sky was still filled with hope…