Pisces Rising's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Pisces Rising left her chamber at dawn, carrying the translucent diary against her chest. The coordinates from the lattice vision pulsed in her mind—three symbols she'd copied but didn't understand. She'd walked Astrologica's shores her entire life, yet these markers pointed somewhere she'd never been. She found the place by midday—a depression in the seafloor where water spiraled downward in slow, dark rings. At its center floated a vortex of violet and midnight blue, defying gravity as it hung suspended above the sand. She recognized it immediately from the lattice vision. This was the portal to her origin. She stepped closer, reaching toward its shimmering edge, and the vortex responded. It expanded suddenly, pulling her translucent form into its current. The world around her refracted into a thousand prismatic angles, then collapsed into a single vision—her own reflection multiplied endlessly, each version showing a different future she might become. But before she could understand what she was seeing, the vision went dark. Pisces Rising stumbled backward, gasping. Her translucent body still glowed faintly, but she couldn't see anything through it anymore—no futures, no prophecies, not even the present moment refracted properly. The vortex had stolen her sight mid-vision. She pressed her palms together, trying to summon the familiar hum, but felt nothing except the cold absence where her gift had been. Around her, the seafloor was littered with jagged glass shards that caught the dim light, reflecting broken fragments of the vision she'd lost. The maelstrom still churned behind her, indifferent to what it had taken. She opened the diary with shaking hands and tried to record what had happened, but her translucent fingers couldn't hold the symbols anymore. The coordinates that had brought her here now seemed like a cruel trick—a path to answers that had cost her the only thing that made her special. She looked back at the vortex, then at the broken glass scattered around her feet. The lattice had shown her the source of her gift, but touching it had destroyed her ability to use it. She couldn't tell if the blindness was temporary or permanent, but she knew one thing with certainty: she'd followed the vision to its end, and it had changed her completely. Whether she could still prove her gift to anyone else no longer mattered. She could barely prove it to herself.