The Shattered World (1)

When Aavern opened his eyes again, he let out a squeak of frustration that quickly turned into surprise. He wasn't in front of Ezarik's castle anymore. For the first time in however many times things had restarted, Aavern was getting somewhere. Now, he was in the midst of a void of nothingness, interrupted by a massive, bright toroid that seemed to contain the world.

The Dimensional Link.

Aavern looked around.

"Did I… succeed? There's no way, right? I haven't even figured out what the trial was even supposed to be about."

Aavern looked around and began wandering the void, making his way to the center of the toroid.

Crashing interrupted his movement. A little ways away, he could see movement. Black on black, against the darkness of the void, it was hard to make out, but Aavern began to close the distance.

Aavern let out a sharp breath.

Two wyverns seemed to be intertwined in a fight.

Dracoa was there, weaving her way among black energy that snapped out violently, throwing blades of wind back and forth in an attempt to hit the other wyvern, whose form was so nebulous and unstable that Aavern had a hard time looking at it.

The shadow.

Dracoa was fighting the shadow.

The closer Aavern looked, the less it looked like a fight. It was a one-sided attack, with Dracoa desperately defending and throwing blades around in hopes of catching the shadow off-guard. But the shadow was never caught, always weaving smoothly between Dracoa's intermittent attacks, steadily approaching Dracoa.

"Dracoa!" Aavern shouted, rushing forwards before his rationality could stop him and argue that he wouldn't be able to contribute to the fight anyways.

Aavern flinched as a stray wind blade passed through him, and again as both Dracoa and the shadow rushed through him, one after the other, still intertwined in their dance of death. He looked down at himself, noticing his ethereal form persisted.

He sighed.

"The trial still isn't over, I guess."

As if to confirm, there was a tearing noise. Aavern found himself back where he started in the Dimensional Link.

Aavern sighed, and looked around.

"So what am I supposed to find this time?"

First it was the cell the shadow broke out of. Was he supposed to find another thing related to the shadow? What was there related to the shadow other than the shadow itself?

Aavern looked around, peering into the void in an attempt to see anything. There was nothing.

"Wait, the shadow was here before, right?"

Aavern recalled the moment the shadow broke into the Dimensional Link, violently bending reality as it approached, before some force - probably the Overseer - threw the shadow out.

Aavern glanced around, trying to orient himself and find where the shadow approached from. He flew over to the central rock around which the toroid spun, and looked around.

"Was it there?"

Aavern couldn't tell. The void seemed to remove all sense of direction. If not for the toroid, Aavern wouldn't even be able to figure out where he was.

Aavern sighed.

"Should I just pick a direction and go?"

Aavern looked around and just moved. One direction, as far as he could. If he couldn't find anything, he would go back and start again. No matter how many times it took.

"As soon as I get out of here, I'm going to the others. We need to go help Dracoa."

Aavern steeled his resolve and began moving, floating in a straight line out into the nothingness.

-

Cyil moved around the cavern ahead, tracing the walls in reverse to how they started, and opened the doorway out. Riselus then moved to shift the rubble blocking the hole in the ceiling. With another rumbling crash, rocks fell out of the way and the hole opened into the desert. They followed him out of the cavern out into the gray light of a warped world.

Cyil sucked in a sharp breath.

The sight was surreal in a strangely harmonious way.

What should have been a sunset was now a round yellow sun, illuminating the sky around it with bright yellows and oranges that faded into greens and blues as the sky curved around them in all directions, ending with a brilliant deep purple that sparkled with tiny lights like stars. Unlike normal sunsets, they could see the sky as if it had encapsulated them from both above and below, casting an eerie light through the world. The sun illuminated an assortment of floating islands holding parts of the continent. What should have been ground was now deep nothingness, stretching on as if one would fall down into the sky if they fell off of the jagged rocky floating islands that hovered in the air, floating through space, trailing long strands of rock chunks. Long shadows stretched through the air like bony, grasping fingers, creating ethereal incorporeal bridges between tiny rock platforms. Chunks of rock split off from the island parts as they collided, being flung in crazy directions. Qassot clicked her tongue in annoyance.

"This will be impossible to navigate," she breathed. "What do you think happened?"

"This sight is more beautiful than the cloud touch," Cyil mumbled, entranced.

The three stared at the disorganized cluster of crazily-angled island masses that were now floating in space, independent of one another.

"I think," Riselus said slowly, "something happened in the void."

"We need to find Azor quickly," Qassot said. "Maybe he'll know how to get to the void.

"Where's Azor's castle?" Riselus asked.

"There," Cyil said.

He pointed a wing at an island floating in the distance. Off to the edge of the cluster, there was a castle and a bright white orb flashing in the air. 

"Why is it this… wet?" Cyil asked suddenly. He waved his wing around the air. "The air is wet!"

"It feels like there's water all around us, but just expanded," Qassot explained.

Cyil sat down. "This isn't making any sense."

An island passed in front of them. Riselus forced some rock into a bridge. He crossed, followed by Cyil and Qassot. The island was a familiar forest. They moved through the calm forest, tinged red, dark grass sliding underfoot. They walked through the eerie silence, shocked, cold, unknown to them all. The trees had moved, making swaths of grass dotted by trees, with more and more trees concentrating as they approached the center. Naturally, they walked towards the center of the woods. It soon became extremely hard to walk forwards; trees became so clustered together that Riselsus had to use his gem to move them aside. There was still no noise. Not even the sound of them breaking through branches went into the forest. The rumble of Riselus moving land around was only felt, not heard. Only their muted breathing echoed in their ears. They managed to break a path through the branches. A sudden empty space startled them all. Qassot landed, scanning the clearing. Riselus busied himself with keeping the path behind them clear of any branches trying to spring back into place.

The scene in the clearing was as eerie as the silence outside. The twelve creatures were frozen in place, around an empty pedestal. Stone rings making platforms surrounded the central platform. The intricate lines emanating from the center were dark.

"Why are they frozen?" Riselus asked, bewildered.

"Wait, the orb!" Qassot shouted, "The earth orb is missing!"

Silence.

"So this is why the island's like this," Cyil said.

"Can we press on? We still need to get to Azor's place," Riselus grunted.

Cyil gasped.

"Behind you."

Qassot turned. The forest trees had been merging together with the grass into a monster much like the guardians once were.

It threw a tree at them.

Cyil hid a tongue of fire in his fur. Qassot generated four swords which immediately went to work at slashing the monster apart. As fast as the swords cut and hacked though, new trees were picked up and added to it.

"Keep going! The forest does not have infinite trees!" Cyil called. 

Riselus began trying to move all the trees away from the monster. He succeeded, and condensed them all into a tight rocklike ball.

Cyil was wrong.

Trees began to grow out of the ground. 

The monster grew more arms.

Another, smaller monster sprouted out of the ground.

Qassot noticed this and retreated.

Cyil threw fire onto a tree. The tree burst into flame. The monsters roared in anger and charged, growing larger at a faster pace. Even more small monsters began to sprout out of the ground to defend the burning tree. Cyil dodged out of the way just in time.

Riselus hurled the rocklike ball towards the monster. It knocked it out of the way and advanced, even through the swords hacking away at its body. Riselus sent a shockwave through the ground, knocking it back.

"It's getting closer, I can't seem to hurt it," Riselus said urgently.

Cyil threw the fireball he had hidden in his fur. It was bright blue, a tinge of green, blazing hotter than anything they had ever seen. It arced a deadly path. It was so hot that everything within a yard of it was scorched to death. The flame hit the largest monster - about four had appeared - squarely in the chest with a deafening explosion, obliterating everything in that clearing and setting the surrounding trees ablaze. The monsters, however, were a different story. The explosion had vaporized them, leaving a smoking heap of blue fire that slowly cooled down to a gentle orange glow. It burnt the very ground. Silence fell on the forest.

Silence broken by another massive tree monster rising up out of the soil.

"You've got to be kidding me!" Cyil yelled, exploding with fire and throwing a scorching beam at the monster's face.

Qassot quickly directed her sword to hack at the monster, but this only served to anger it more. It rapidly closed the distance, jumping over the shockwave Riselus threw at it, and reared up to punch Cyil.

"JUST BURN!" Cyil screamed, throwing another bright blue fireball from his fur into the monster's face before it could punch him. The explosion knocked him away violently and vaporized the monster from the knees up.

Another monster rose up from the remains of the vaporized one.

"Again!? This is getting ridiculous!" Cyil yelled in frustration.

"Let's just run! It's going to keep regenerating as long as there's forest left!" Qassot called.

"Then let's just burn down the whole forest!"

"You live here!"

Cyil threw another fireball at the monster before it could fully get up. It crumbled.

Another monster rose up in its place.

"I wouldn't have lived here if I knew this thing was here!"

The ground suddenly shifted, throwing Cyil and Qassot towards Riselus.

"We're leaving," Riselus grunted. Massive rock walls sprung out of the ground, closing in around the monster, as the trio quickly fled the clearing before another monster could appear.

"Why is that thing harder to fight than every other guardian?" Cyil asked, hiding a few more tongues of flame in his fur.

"Let's just get off this island before it comes after us," Qassot said.