The last words of the Jade Oracle were still ringing inside my head, "Die."
Then there was the pain that lingered as my body was reduced to atoms. You would think that if your body were shattered, there would be no more pain, but that is if the shattering happened to a mortal; as mages, our souls are our greatest sensory organs, and it could persevere for longer than any mortal’s, especially a soul like mine.
However, I was grateful that death still came fast, as the same force that shredded my body also shredded my soul.
I woke up into darkness, but this was not the familiar darkness of the unknown grand engine that took up my soul and spat it into the past; this darkness was different, almost soft, like the darkness behind your eyelids when you are not quite asleep and not quite awake.
Hmm, I could feel my eyes, and I did not know if I should open them. Was I dreaming? Did my soul suffer such great damage that it had fled into a dream to restore itself?
But this did not feel like a dream, because I could feel the ground beneath me, it was soft, and it smelled of something I had not smelled in two years. Wildflowers.
"It has to be Blue flowers," I thought, though I could not see them. I could feel them pressing against my shoulders, hips, and my bare feet.
This was enough sensory information for me to know that I was not in my tent, and I opened my eyes, and I did not see canvas above me. What I saw was a deep blue sky that was almost black, and scattered across it were more stars than I had ever seen in my life.
These stars were brighter than what I used to see in the night, and they seemed closer to the earth, but their position in the sky was familiar, and there were a few that I did not recognize.
Then my eyes caught the light of the moon, and I gasped in surprise because there were two moons in the sky.
One was large and silver, and it was the familiar moon I had grown up with, and the other was smaller, reddish, hanging low on the horizon like a bruise. I almost thought it was the light of a setting sun, but on closer inspection, I could see that it was indeed a moon.
I stared at it, fascinated. I had never imagined that there could be a second moon in the sky; it almost felt unnatural. Of course, there should be one sun and one moon; that was how it had always been, and always would be... but if this was the sky of my world, why were there more stars in the sky and two moon?
But here, in this dream or vision, there were two. This was the second time I was having an experience like this, and up to this moment, I could not say with one hundred percent whether what I was experiencing was real or the hallucination of a mind that had been taken past the limit.
I tried to move, but my body would not obey. I was pinned to the field of blue flowers, weightless and heavy at the same time, my arms and legs spread wide as if I had fallen from a great height and the ground had caught me.
I can tell you, this did not help my case that what I was experiencing was not a nightmare of a broken mind.
And as I struggled to lift even one of my fingers, I noticed that the stars were moving.
At first, I thought it was my eyes playing tricks, but no, they were moving, and the more I looked, did it not seem as if they were getting closer? Shit, they were, the damned stars were falling.
I watched, helpless, as the stars streaked across the darkness, leaving trails of silver light that lingered like a scar. The skies began to brighten, and my eyes widened as one of the falling stars struck the second moon.
The impact was silent, maybe because it happened too far from me, or there was no sound in this dream, but I saw the moon crack, its red surface fractured along lines that spread outward like lightning, and for a moment, the cracks glowed with the same silver-white light that ran through my own channels, and then the star that had struck the moon emerged from the other side and the moon exploded.
The debris of the moon began to fall, and the sky filled with fire.
I gasp in horror and awe as the falling moon fragments drag tails of flame behind them, red and gold and white, and the heat of it reaches me. The stars were falling faster now, dozens, each one trailing its own ribbon of light, and the sky that had been deep and quiet was now a storm of falling fire.
Shards of the moon began to fall to the earth, and the ground began to shake and tear apart even as mountains crumbled, and I thought, in the distance, there was a shadow of massive, scaly wings and the roar of a great beast as the oceans began to boil.
The sky above me brightened, and I saw a bright spear of light descending upon me. It grew in my vision until it blotted out the sky, and I saw that it was not a spear, but the damned Caelith, glowing red with heat so unbearable that the blue flowers that surrounded me began to blacken and curl, and with a whoosh they came alight, and I was covered in flames.
The world seemed to slow down as I could not even scream before the tip of the Caelith, as sharp as a needle despite its impossible size, slammed into my forehead, and I woke up.
"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"
I gasped, cold sweat pouring from my body as I sat up, trying to ease my breathing, "fuck, fuck, fuck... fuck this shit!"