Nyxara
🕯️Content Warning: Mild references to physical pain and recovery discomfort, handled gently. No explicit triggers beyond rehabilitation strain.
[Seraphelle 5th, 4310]
"We'll start light," Aspen says gently, suddenly crouching beside my chair in his private therapy room. "Meditative core regulation, then structured emotional stabilization therapy. We'll tailor each session to your pace. You won't be alone, and we won't rush you."
"Your essence is already responding to the severance. It's slow, but promising. You'll begin to feel like yourself again soon—though that 'self' may not be the one you remember." I smother the inappropriate chuckle that bubbles up. If only he knew how true that statement truly would be.
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[Dreamscape]
"A gentle breeze carried the scent of dusk-bloomed sandalwood and black tea from my left, just brushing my nose, before a stronger breeze from the right overwhelmed it with dark honey, frankincense, and wild plum." The scents seemed to spiral around me before disappearing, leaving me looking up at the stars hanging in the branches of sakura trees.
Vibrant pink, twinkling stars, and lush greenery.
I don't remember falling asleep—and I'm not even sure I am. Everything is so intense and feels real. I can feel the path beneath my feet and the petals falling around me. The shimmering moonlit silver, blush rose, hazy lavender, and starlight blue of the gown I'm wearing pleases me. Some of my favorite colors. The Dillards always tried to convince me to never wear them. It feels right to wear them now.
In front of me, there is a young woman up on a ladder picking stars from the trees, popping them into her mouth as if they were fruit. She is barefoot like me and is wearing a gown that seems to be made of glimmering rainbow dust.
She turns.
And I see me. A twin to the face I now see in the mirror on my new world.
Well, not exactly. As I watch, she appears to be getting younger, freer… like she's returning to a simpler carefree days. My previous hazel-green eyes on that face carry secrets I can barely glimpse. Her face shows a joy I was not expecting.
She smiles with easy amusement, and her voice is my voice—only wiser somehow.
"Phase one complete. It appears you are picking up where I left off while I get to go back to the day everything changed for you."
So many questions, but I don't know what to ask first—why did she make that choice, why does she seem to know more about what is going on than I do, and why does my gut say that like me, she was given a choice?
"We will have our moment to really talk soon," she says gently. "You're not ready for answers. Not yet. But you will be. When you've healed more. When you're strong enough to receive what I carried."
"You're her, the other Nyx," I whisper.
She nods. "The one who died so you could be where you were always meant to be."
"Where I am meant to be?"
That smile again, bittersweet and knowing.
"There is much you don't know and aren't ready to know yet. Some things I will tell you when we meet again, and other matters you will have to discover on your own. I hope we both do better this time around when it comes to learning the difference between breaking and bending. We haven't failed yet, Nyxara. We are finally free and where we belong."
She drops a few stars into my hand, then pops another into her mouth. I pop one in my mouth as well, and the taste exploded like a star on my tongue—decadent, dizzying. We grin at each other, enjoying the starfruit.
"I'll soon be the right age to be put into the timeline, so this is where we part for now. We'll talk again soon. When our dreams align again."
The dream begins to fade— falling petals turn into stars, the sky folding into mist. Her voice reaches me one last time. This time, she sounds like a teenager. She sounds like she is the age I was when I lost my family.
"I'll make this second chance count. You do the same. This is Grey signing out. Until next time, Nyx."
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From there, the next two weeks went by fast. I kept a consistent journal of the days that passed like clouds—soft, formless, quiet. I made entries about the other days that felt like I was dragging chains across shattered glass. Yet it was in the stillness of my room, beneath the muted hum of healing wards and filtered moonlight, that I began to stitch myself back together.
[Week One — Seraphelle 4th to 10th]
Treatment began on the 4th of Seraphelle—four days after I first woke in that strange clearing. They wanted to give me more time to just be, but the restlessness would not allow me to wait on starting my healing. I'm on a time crunch, and if I'm cleared to begin treatment, I'm going to begin treatment. I did learn I wasn't in a hospital but at Sanctum Ajei, one of my enclave's healing clinics.
No rest for the wicked, and I intend to be the best on my own terms. Solhara won't know what hit them once I'm ready for public consumption. I cackled quietly, careful not to alert the nurses that I was awake and not napping.
I think Aspen is a sadist. That is the only conclusion I could come to after my first week of treatment. The gentle, sweet Aspen I thought I knew is a bloody sadist. The first week was about stillness.
My physical and metaphysical bodies were kept under constant observation. Between physical therapy and what Aspen called essence stabilization, my muscles ached from disuse while my essence flickered at odd intervals like a sputtering candle. Every stretch, every breath was a negotiation between body and soul. Sensor nodes—thin, opalescent discs—rested over my spine and heart, tracking the realignment of my essence pathways to my heart, hands, and crown cores.
Each day, I stretched. Slow, deliberate. Hands trembling toward the ceiling. Soles grounding to the earth. Breath threading through muscle and memory. Hold. Release. Repeat. Aspen said my essence and body were like birds re-learning how to sing in a new throat. In harmony with one another.
No pain. No gain, Nyx. The results will be worth it. Never back down, never give up.
[Week Two — Seraphelle 11th to 17th]
I repeat, Aspen Ajei is a sadist and he has convinced everyone else on my care team to push me to the limit regardless of my threats and whines. He has not allowed our family to physically return so that they "won't coddle me". His words, which I will have to believe, mean my family would make me take a slower pace if they were allowed to see me like this.
So I plastered on a smile during video calls and told them nothing about this brutally effective rehabilitation. He did listen to me about Papa's rumble vibrations helping to ease my body. We use it in my wind-down ritual.
The second week was movement.
I took my first solo steps again—halting, strange, but mine. Magical therapy guided my limbs and rebuilt memory in my muscles. Enchanted panels along the floor taught me balance; conjured wind by the nurses carried my weight when I faltered.
Aspen began my mental conditioning of harmonizing my body, mind, and essence back into alignment. Gently, his presence would float through the corridors of my mind, helping me repair and construct nodes and pathways that had become burnt or stagnant. He would guide me through breathing and centering, while we quietly recited positive affirmations.
The more I synced up with this body, the more I unlocked its potential. I quickly realized all my senses— sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste—were now enhanced. There is also a sixth sense, my essence sense, but we are still slowly familiarizing me with that sense in stages. To help keep the world from overwhelming me, Aspen showed me calming sigils—anchoring glyphs that shimmered like breath on glass. I traced them with my fingertips when my heart raced. When someone's voice got too loud. When my body and essence remembered things my mind didn't.
And all the while, the world outside my private ward stayed distant. I knew the time for my bubble to pop would be coming soon. By the fourteenth, preparations began for my departure from the hospital. Clean clothes in soft neutral tones. New wristbands keyed to my biometrics. I'm sure they will be used to track me as well. My loving but very overprotective family has made it very clear that they would not be allowing me to go untraceable for the foreseeable future. Plus this was one of the conditions from my other papa, Azrail, so he would not go wipe the Dillard enclave out. I have had voice calls and text message conversations with him but I still don't know what he looks like.
It will be interesting to meet my other papa, Azrail, officially in a few days. Keir mentioned they had to put him into magical stasis while they got me on the path to recovery before they woke him up. He seems like he is going to be the super fun parent who is also very scary. I'm both nervous and excited.
I'm finally stable enough to be released into home care. Aspen has made it clear that if I thought he was a sadist, he had nothing on Keir. He informed me with pride that Keir is called the re-forger for a reason. "He is considered the best trainer of our paramilitary forces." With a mischievous gleam in his eyes, Aspen helped me stretch as he talked. "He'll respect your limits—but that's the only respect you'll get during training."
Even Lux subtly but proudly told me that my sunny brother will actually test my limits to find my hard limits and get me conditioned to reach my peak form. "So enjoy a day or two of rest when you get home. You are going to need it." This is what Lux warned. "Because after that he will put you through hell and you will possibly hate Keir for the next month or so. You probably won't stop hating him until you are able to notice the changes."
Lying in bed, staring out the floor-to-ceiling window, I let myself hope that maybe I haven't just found a safe place—but maybe, finally, a home. Only time will tell. Maybe Angel actually did a good job sending me here. I silently offer up a prayer of thanks to the mysterious being. Some time later, I would be slingshotting daily complaints about the details of this new life, Angel forgot to mention during our lunch meeting. Does anyone know if mortals can slap extra dimensional beings?