Olryme's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

Olryme rose from the cold stone under the strange sky. The blood moon was climbing somewhere they could not see. They had no time for honest paths. From inside their folded presence, they drew out a thing they had sworn never to touch — a tall mirror in dark metal, its glass a sliding skin of gold and deep blue. The mirror was forbidden because it did not ask. It took. Olryme set a palm to the glass and reached, across all that distance, for the thread of essence Nyxi had left in the sleeping mortal — and through that thread, for Nyxi herself. The glass warmed. A pull began, small and wrong, like tugging a tooth from a living mouth. Far away, Nyxi flinched. Olryme felt it. They pulled harder. The mirror drank her place and gave it to them. Light folded around Olryme's body. Stone slid out from under their feet. They landed on the black soil outside the temple in a burst of shimmering particles — a slow cloud of pink and gold dust hanging in the air where they had arrived, stars drifting through it like ash that refused to fall. The mirror cracked in their hand and went dark. It had cost them something they had not named yet. The ground answered. Red lines woke under the soil and crawled outward in careful shapes. Blood-bright runes burned around a low stone pillar, lit from beneath like cooling iron. The blood moon had risen while Olryme was gone. The ritual had already begun. Nyxi stepped out of the temple doors, one hand pressed to her side where the pull had bitten her. Her black lips parted. She was surprised. Olryme saw it, and for the first time in eons did not match it — they had known they would arrive. Behind her, through the open door, the sleeping mortal lay inside the waking ring. Olryme walked forward into the red light.