[You have gained the power of Corruption: Devil.]
The Spell's voice, usually a cold and distant chime, felt insidiously intimate as it whispered into the marrow of Asteria's bones. It seemed to purr, a lingering vibration that felt almost like a plea for her to delve deeper into the abyss she had just stepped into.
"The... power of corruption?" The Queen of Nightmare gasped, her voice a ragged thread. Her lungs felt like they had been scorched from the inside out, and each inhale was a desperate, rattling struggle to reclaim the air that had been stolen by the agony of her transformation.
She summoned her runes with a trembling thought. In the shimmering light of her soul sea, the familiar lines had been rewritten by an invisible, ruthless hand.
[Class: Devil]
[Dream Cores: 3/3]
[Corrupted Cores: 1/4]
'...Marvellous. Just bloody marvellous.'
Her hard-won [Spell Fragments] had vanished, liquidated to fuel the birth of the fourth core. But these were no longer the vibrant, violet spheres of a dreamer.
Asteria's gaze drifted down to the newly manifested lines, the runes pulsing with a thrumming that echoed her own racing heartbeat.
[Corrupted Powers: Devil]
[Devil: "Formed by wielding an unnatural power, a fourth core has been forged. Your physical vessel has been fundamentally reinforced. The potency and quantity of your cores have been increased. Take heed, Queen of Nightmare: those who bear the mark of Corruption will sense you with heightened clarity. You shall be coveted prey to the strong, while the weak shall instinctively bow to your glory."]
"I suppose that's a comfort," Asteria sighed, her voice dripping with irony. Her legs felt like leaden weights, numb and unresponsive against the cold basement floor, and her chest still ached with the ghost of the searing heat that had birthed her new class.
The Insatiable Queen of Nightmare would have loved, perhaps even begged, for the luxury of rest.
And so she fell into quiet slumber.
***
Alas, the universe seemed determined to deny her even a moment's respite. Despite her essence having largely replenished itself, a gnawing, hollow sensation began to bloom in the centre of her being. It wasn't the simple dehydration of a long training session or the mundane hunger of a missed meal.
It was a void.
It felt as though a bottomless, ravenous maw had opened behind her ribs, screaming with a primal desire to consume. It craved the very spark of life that animated the world — the essence that made up every living creature, whether they were children or thralls of the corruption. Asteria had never truly understood the mechanics of the soul, yet the name of this craving rose to her lips with terrifying intuition.
The Flame of Desire.
She yearned to feast upon it, to snuff out the flickering warmth of others to satiate the cold hunger of her cores. The desire to return to the Dream Realm was now inextricably tangled with a hunger to consume those who lived within it more than it already did.
Gritting her teeth against the rising tide of her own nature, Asteria dove back into her soul sea. The chaotic, rainbow-like waves of her essence greeted her with a frantic turbulence. High above the shimmering waters, three violet cores hung like silent stars. But the fourth... the fourth was a black sun. It was darker than the midnight sky over the horizon, more haunting than the deepest nightmare, and radiated a coldness that made her greatest fears feel like a warm memory.
Corruption had taken root in her soul.
***
In the days that followed, Asteria managed to make a significant number of very powerful people incredibly anxious.
She stood now before the manor of the Immortal Flame. It was an act of staggering political audacity — a Princess of the Great Clan Song, openly visiting the ancestral home of a fallen, chided clan that had been relegated to the fringes of the Clans.
All for the sake of a single person.
Changing Star of the Immortal Flame.
Asteria was led through the winding, silent halls of the manor. The journey was plagued by a gauntlet of polite interrogations and veiled threats from the dwindling clan's loyalists, all suspicious of her motives. Finally, she was granted entry to the sanctum.
She found herself standing before a cloudy, translucent sleeping pod. Inside, amidst the swirling nutrient mists, lay the silver-haired, stoic beauty of Nephis.
Asteria possessed a vague sense of the Changing Star's location within the Dream Realm, thanks to the fragmented visions they occasionally shared. She hoped — she prayed to whatever dead gods might be listening — that she wouldn't manifest in a vacuum or atop a mountain peak waiting for a fall.
Placing her hand upon the cool surface of the pod, she felt the familiar, chilling whisper of the Spell.
[You can enter, Awakened Demon, Changing Star's dream.]
[Would you like to enter?]
Asteria braced herself for the transition and finally muttered: "Yes."
***
Aboard the Chain Breaker, a sleek vessel of wood and iron that defied the laws of the abyss, a cohort was preparing for their Second Nightmare.
Changing Star, Raised by Wolves, Nightingale, Song of the Fallen and Lost from Light were all on deck. Their armours had been dismissed, their skin glistening with the sweat of a day spent battling the scorching heat that rose from the islands below. It was a rare moment of peace, even if it was a peace forged in the shadow of impending doom.
The ship drifted through the near-absolute darkness of the endless abyss, heading toward a destiny none of them were certain they would survive. Everything was as perfect as things could be in the Dream Realm.
Until reality decided to buckle.
CRASH.
The deck shuddered as a rift tore open three feet above the wood.
"Wooo... Ah, blast it, that hurts!" A girl with hair that shimmered with the chaotic hues of an oil slick collapsed onto the deck. The girl scrambled to her feet, immediately finding the business end of several weapons pointed at her throat. "Hey! Hey! Put those away! I'm a guest!" she cried, waving her hands in a frantic gesture of surrender.
"Asteria?" Changing Star narrowed her eyes, her expression remaining characteristically nonchalant even as she held a lethal edge. "How, exactly, did you get here?"
"Hehe, the same way I found you at the Forgotten Shore!" Asteria chirped, placing a finger to her lips. "Trade secret, of course. A lady must have her mysteries."
"Asteria?" Nightingale gasped, his facial expression glittering in surprise.
"Asteria!" Raised by Wolves cheered, a grin spreading across her face.
"...Queen of Nightmare," Lost from Light muttered, his eyes narrowing with a dark, suspicious intensity.
Song of the Fallen, however, remained silent. Asteria noticed the girl's troubled expression immediately.
"You certainly didn't expect me, did you? And here I thought you'd have warned the lot of them about my dramatic arrival!" The Queen of Nightmare joked, her grin cheeky.
"I... I didn't see you in any of the visions," the blind seer whispered, a note of genuine defeat in her voice.
Asteria shrugged, not wanting to dwell on it. "So... where are we going?"
"We?" the Shadow scoffed, crossing his arms. "Where do you think you're going?"
"On an adventure? To save you all a bit of time? Honestly, Sunless, you're so pessimistic," she tilted her head with mock confusion.
***
The Chain Breaker eventually docked at a monolith of black stone — a tower that seemed to drink the light of the stars.
"Welcome to the Ebony Island," Lost from Light stated solemnly.
He guided the group through the ominous, echoing halls, ascending floor after floor. Nightingale and Raised by Wolves looked around with a mixture of curiosity and primal fear, sensing the ancient weight of the place. But it was what lay beyond the tower that caught Asteria's breath.
Across a bridge of shifting stone lay the Ivory Island.
It was a tranquil haven of white stone and emerald meadows. A peaceful grove of trees rustled in a gentle, spectral wind, and a magnificent pagoda — built of a material that seemed to be neither stone nor timber — shimmered with a sublime, divine radiance. And there, reflecting the harsh light of the sun, lay the bleached bones of a dead dragon.
They walked through the jaws of the beast, entering the silent, hallowed darkness of chains.
"Hope. These are Hope's Shackles," Asteria whispered, the words tasting like iron on her tongue.
'Fate is a cruel mistress. Am I truly dancing to your tune, Weaver? And I had the gall to call Sunless a dog of fate.' She felt the strings of the Daemon tightening around her soul.
Seven massive chains lay coiled upon the pristine white floor, each ending in a broken, mangled shackle inscribed with a chaotic mess of runes. In the centre of the hall, a shimmering mass of ethereal wisps rose from the stone, coalescing into a pulsating rift of pure, liquid darkness.
It was a Nightmare Seed.
Asteria was instantly mesmerised. Her senses screamed — a discordant harmony of warning and ecstasy. But deeper than her Aspect or her Class, something primal responded to the Seed.
It smelled sweet. Sickeningly, tantalisingly sweet. It was the scent of a mother's embrace, the promise of every desire fulfilled, a whisper in the blood that told her to walk forward and drown in the rift.
It was in her blood.
It was her heritage — the blood of a god now forgotten calling out to the corruption in her heart.
Asteria violently tore her eyes away, her heart hammering. She knew instinctively that to touch the Seed while in this state would be to lose herself entirely. With a sharp, decisive movement, she summoned her [Obsidian Class] blade; for one enchantment. [Messenger's Duty.]
She thrust the blade deep into her own thigh. The translucent glass of the blade bit into her flesh, and her blood — dark and rich — dripped onto the pristine marble. The sharp, white-hot agony acted as an anchor, dragging her back from the precipice of the Seed's allure.
"What on earth are you doing?!" the cohort shouted in unison, shocked by the sudden self-mutilation.
"Don't... don't worry," Asteria panted, her jaw clenched against the pain. "It was necessary."
She straightened her back, the blade still lodged in her leg to keep the pain fresh. She turned to the pale, stunned faces of her friends.
"Please. Wait a few days — a week, if you can — before you enter this Seed."
Changing Star frowned, her grey eyes searching Asteria's face. "For what reason?"
"Trust me. You're going to want me to do this," Asteria waved a hand toward the rift. "My Aspect... it allows me to interact with these things in a way yours don't."
"And what does that mean for us, exactly?" The Star of Change asked, her voice cool but not unkind.
Asteria sighed. "You're really making me spill my secrets, and I'm only doing it because I actually like you lot..." She forced a small chuckle. "I can enter and exit Nightmare Seeds without needing to complete the trial. I am offering to scout this Nightmare for you. I'll minimise your risk of death."
The silence that followed was heavy. The revelation was staggering — the ability to bypass the Spell's most fundamental trap was unheard of.
"Does that mean you can participate in trials of your own rank?" Raised by Wolves asked slowly.
"Yes."
"And will you help us clear it once you've scouted it?"
"I will not."
"I can't say I'm surprised, but it still stings," Effie turned to Changing Star. "Well? Are we letting the crazy girl go first?"
The Changing Star nodded slowly. "Thank you, Asteria. Be careful."
Asteria limped toward the centre of the shackles, her hand trembling as she reached toward the wavering rift in the air.
[You can enter the Second Trial: Desire's Shackles.]
[Would you like to enter this trial?]
"I wouldn't be standing here bleeding if I didn't... Yes!"
[Queen of Nightmare, Welcome to Desire's Shackles. What will you do this time, blessed by the Spell?]
***
Asteria was catapulted through the fabric of time. She saw the Kingdom of Hope in its glory and its ruin, a plethora of islands and bridges...
...before she was suddenly plummeting.
She hit the soil of an island with bone-shattering force, the breath knocked from her lungs. She rolled, gasping, and looked up into a face she would never forget.
A man who was covered in moonlight.