Asteria's breath came in ragged, uneven hitches.
Her slippers slapped against the white marble, a sound so lonely it made her skin crawl. Behind her, the "Princess" was still standing in that obsidian-framed room, likely still asking the air if something was the matter.
'Freelance,' she thought, her mind racing. 'I'm a freelance handmaid. Contract terminated. Effective immediately. I'm taking my severance package in the form of my own life, thanks you!'
Suddenly, the air didn't just vibrate; it groaned.
BONG.
The sound didn't come from the towers. It erupted from the base of her skull. It was a psychic tolling, a hum so deep it made her teeth feel loose in her gums. Asteria stumbled, her shoulder slamming into a fresco of some ancient, forgotten king. The king's painted eyes seemed to track her fall, filled with a pity that felt far too real.
'Isnt [Mental Fortification] supposed to help at all? This attribute is useless. Useless, I tell you! Damnation!'
She crawled to a balcony overlooking the Great Plaza. The sight that met her was enough to make her want to crawl back into the Princess's obsidian mirror and take her chances with the weeping reflection.
Thousands of citizens were standing in perfect, concentric circles. From the high-born lords in their velvet robes to the street urchins in their rags, everyone was motionless. Their heads were tilted back at an identical, agonizing angle, staring into the bruised-plum sky.
And then, the light changed.
The violet haze began to thicken, descending like a heavy, suffocating blanket. As it touched the people, they didn't scream. They didn't even blink. Instead, their skin began to shimmer. It hardened, turning translucent and reflective. Within seconds, the plaza was no longer filled with people – it was a forest of beautiful, hollow glass statues.
Asteria watched, paralyzed, as a young mother holding a child turned into a crystalline monument. The child's glass fingers were locked in a reach for a face that was no longer warm.
'They're... they're beautiful,' a voice whispered in the back of her mind. It wasn't her voice. It was soft and unnaturally sweet. 'Join them, Asteria. It's so quiet here. No more static. No more fear. Just the Dream.'
Her eyelids grew heavy. The marble balcony felt soft; like a bed of feathers. The violet sky started to look less like a bruise and more like a sunset she had seen once in a movie.
The spell screamed into her ears, that same familiar voice was now lecturing her.
[Attribute: Dream Walker is resonating...]
[Warning: You are being synced to the Great Machine.]
'You've got to be kidding me?!'
Asteria's hand drifted to the sash she didn't remember picking back up – the shimmering silk meant for the Princess. Hidden in its folds was a jagged shard of the glass that had broken earlier. Without thinking, she gripped the shard, the sharp edge slicing into her palm.
The bite of cold, sharp pain was like a bucket of ice water over her soul.
"Not... today," she wheezed, the intoxicating scent in her mind replaced by the metallic tang of her own blood. "Not today, Satan!"
She used the pain as an anchor. Every time the sweet voice returned, she pressed the shard deeper into her hand. She began to chant nonsense under her breath, a rebellious daydream of her own.
She imagined a world of grey rain, of muddy shoes, of burnt toast and taxes. She imagined the most boring, gritty, un-magical things she could think of, building a wall of mental "trash" to keep the "Divine Union" from weaving into her mind. 'Disgusting, crazy spell.'
The hum in the air changed frequency. It went from a peaceful lullaby to a hungry, jagged whine.
Out of the violet clouds, It descended.
The "Messenger of the Gods" was at least twenty feet tall. It didn't have a body so much as a collection of geometric shapes held together by humming static and golden wire. Where a face should be, there was a spinning, multi-layered ring of eyes that didn't seem to perceive the physical world at all.
It landed in the plaza with a sound like a thousand windows breaking at once.
Asteria watched, her breath hitching, as the Messenger moved toward the glass statues. It didn't embrace them. It didn't bless them.
It swung a massive, obsidian-heavy limb, shattering the glass mother and child into a million glittering fragments.
As the statues broke, a cloud of golden "dust", the very essence of their souls, was sucked into the spinning rings of the Messenger's "face." The creature let out a sound of pure, mechanical ecstasy.
'I can't fight that,' Asteria realized, her [Intuition] screaming so loud it was a physical pain. 'This damn attribute doesn't need to tell me twice.'
The Messenger turned its spinning eyes toward the palace balcony.
The static in Asteria's head reached a fever pitch. Her aspect, [Static Echo], flared to life. The world didn't look like marble and silk anymore; it looked like a flickering, low-resolution broadcast.
She saw the "Messenger" for what it truly was: a manifestation of the Spell's hunger, a literal "glitch" in the reality of this world designed to delete everything in its path.
"Maid..." the creature's voice echoed, thousands of voices layered over one another. "You are... out of sync. You are... noise. Noise must be... silenced."
The creature began to glide toward the palace, its heavy obsidian limbs leaving cracks in the air itself.
Asteria looked at the shard in her hand, then at the sprawling, crystalline graveyard of the plaza. She felt the [Static Echo] within her pulsing in time with the creature's movement. She wasn't just hearing the machine anymore; she was starting to see its mechanics.
Through the agonizing static, she saw a circuit board of golden threads. A myriad of stars.
Once more, she was reminded of that stupid aspect she received that was supposed to be a flaw.
'I'm an echo, huh?' she thought, a wild, desperate sort of humor bubbling up in her chest. 'Well, they say echoes always have the last word.'
She didn't wait for the Messenger to reach her. She turned and sprinted back into the dark hallways of the palace. If the city was the "Dream," and the Messenger was the "Harvest," then the palace had to be the "Engine."
And if there was one thing she knew about machines, it was that they hated grit in their gears.
"Guess I'm the grit," she whispered, her voice lost in the roaring, psychic symphony of the falling city.
'Wait, where am I going? – Right. That stupid bell.'
That disgusting, tolling bell.
The Great Bell.