[Notice: Mana heart density has reached the necessary threshold!]
Addy glanced at the text in her mind’s eye, her consciousness barely registering the words. What a strange dream she was having.
[Notice: Mana heart density has ignited ethereal fusion!]
[Containing prismatic coronas…]
[Warning: Coronal ejection containment likely to cause pain!]
“Hah…” Addy moaned, the pain something akin to her heart being squeezed. She vacillated between consciousness and unconsciousness, never fully awakening, but never sleeping deeply enough to ignore the fire that burned in her center, just above her gut.
She was vaguely aware of electric sparks shooting up and down the rest of her body, as if her heart had been plugged directly into a wall socket, but it was drowned out by the intense discomfort in her chest. The burning steadily intensified until it was no longer flame. A plasma burned, melted, and shocked her core, racking her mind with agony.
Lashes of suffering struck her chest cavity, as though an angry god was attempting to burst out. Though her sensations were scant, she could feel the contractions in her muscles that sent her arching off her bed, the pain twisting her back into a bridge. Sweat was undoubtedly soaking her sheets.
[Containment successful!]
[Beginning second-stage compression…]
The lashings of lava ceased, and her body collapsed back onto her bed, yet the ordeal was not over.
“Mmm!” she whimpered, her cries small, like one having a nightmare, as her chest collapsed on itself.
The fire was extinguished, and in its place, a void grew. An insatiable hunger gnawed at her body, draining the energy from every fiber of her being. She felt herself eroding away, every second leaving less of who she was. She worried that it would take only a few moments to erase herself entirely.
Addy had no perception of time. She felt she had been lying there, suffering, for days. Perhaps it had been second, or perhaps months had passed. Each seemed equally as likely to her pain-addled mind, still never fully surfacing to lucidity.
[Notice: Collapse complete. Mana horizon stabilizing.]
The hunger receded, its absence revealing an abyss within her. Without the pain and suffering flooding her senses, she felt the void thoroughly, its crushing depths threatening, yet also comforting. It was a dichotomous feeling, perhaps like a knife that could be threatening when held by an enemy and comforting when she held it.
[Notice: Mana singularity created!]
[Finalizing…]
Suddenly, a titanic presence settled over her mind. It clearly did not aim to harm her, but having her innermost world invaded without her consent set her body to shivering, her teeth chattering. The discomfort was visceral and violent, all personal boundaries shattered.
It drew threads from her mind like a seamstress, skillfully weaving them around the void. As she watched, unable to do anything but bear with it, Addy was shocked to see the threads of her mind twist and spin, forming bright blue lights that swirled around the void like an accretion disk around a black hole.
Her mind-threads roiled and ignited where they clashed, sparking small stars with every brief connection. It was beautiful.
[Notice: Tesseract formed successfully!]
[Race change complete.]
Race change? Addy wondered, her mind improving now that the ordeal seemed complete. A text box appeared before her, unbidden.
[Name: Nephthys
Race: Celestial Djinn
Class: Nova {Unique}
Level: 999+]
Strange. Nephthys is her in-game name in Prelude. Why would it be showing up now? Was she actually dreaming about Prelude? Why did this dream have to include such pain when it could have been fun?!
Her race was unusual. There were no races in Prelude—or none that were playable, at least. All players started as humans. True, there were rituals and skills that could alter one’s body such that they might as well be a different species altogether, but there was no classification for them.
She had undergone the Djinn transformation, being primarily a magic-focused character. Djinn seemed inspired by their mythic counterparts and were beings of pure mana, each containing a mana core. They were treated as a sentient species by the game’s lore, but none actually existed in the game world beyond the players themselves.
Few players chose abilities or rituals that changed them dramatically, since they came with equally dramatic trade-offs. The Djinn, for example, took the player’s stamina bar and fused it with their mana bar, effectively locking them out of any stamina-based abilities forever but improving their total mana capacity in exchange, along with other tertiary benefits.
However, even if the game had been patched to treat Djinn as a unique player race, hers should just be a plain Djinn, not this ‘Celestial Djinn.’
The name must relate to her Primarch powers.
With the release of the Ashreach expansion, a few unique skill trees were introduced, with their unlocking method not disclosed publicly. They were also exclusive. Only one player per server could unlock a Primarch path, so other players had to server-hop or look for a different Primarch path that had not been claimed yet, which were already limited.
Addy stumbled on the Celestial Primarch path by rescuing a unique NPC called ‘The Astronomer’ out in the wilderness. He had been captured and hidden in a hole outside a rather innocuous raider camp.
She only discovered him because she was on a quest to dominate Ashreach’s PvP, so she checked the game map top to bottom. A magic-focused class had to be crafty, and a terrain advantage could not be overlooked. In fact, knowing the terrain had probably won her around half her PvP battles.
After rescuing the NPC and escorting him back to her Guild’s base, the option to gain the class ‘Nova’ appeared, an inheritance of the ‘Celestial Primarch,’ apparently. Accepting the offer changed her class, granting her access to the Celestial skill tree, but that was it. There were no changes to her body or what she would perceive as her ‘race,’ which, again, was not something that existed in Prelude.
What a strange dream, she thought idly, her mind still distant. She felt that the dream was ending. She could feel the peaceful fog of sleep approaching, and she was in no mood to deny it. She needed all the rest she could get before her next shift, after all. Playing Prelude could wait, much as it pained her.
With a lurch, her bed began to tilt, and she suddenly became aware that the surface beneath her was not memory foam. She felt as though she lay atop a wooden table. In fact, she could feel tenderness in the small of her back, where bruises were likely to form after her pained thrashing against what was decidedly not her mattress.
Her body slowly tilted, her stomach whirling as motion she could neither see nor control pitched her upright. Instinctively, she tried to move, to stabilize herself, but she found her limbs restrained by leather straps. Fear gripped her as a thousand and one questions ran through her mind, all without answers. She began to fight the bindings and, much to her surprise, they gave.
Pings and pops announced the surrender of nails holding the straps down, and Addy found she could suddenly lift her limbs a couple of inches off the surface they were bound to.
“Mistress, please cease. Your confusion is understandable, but please do not damage the altar. I will release you posthaste once repositioned,” an unfamiliar voice pleaded.
Only now did it occur to Addy that she might not be dreaming. True, she could remember plenty of dreams in which she seemed to be having coherent conversations, but she was never lucid. Now, fully—or mostly—lucid, her first thought had been to will the straps away. A dream should obey her will, yet they had not budged until she struggled.
Was the possibility of being trapped in a dream she was aware of but could not control, or being strapped to an ‘altar’ in real life, more frightening? She did not know.
Prying her heavy lids open with enormous force of will, she saw two dark blurs before an even blurrier landscape. She was used to the adjustment period when one can barely see upon waking, but this felt different. She felt as if she had slept for years, and it would subsequently take minutes, at least, to clear the coma from her eyes.
With a thunk, the altar stopped, situating her in a standing position, though she was now slumped due to the slack she had created in the straps, nearly hanging by them. Both blurs moved to either side of her, fiddling with the straps by the sound. Suddenly, she flopped free of the straps, caught under both shoulders, and was hoisted over toward a wall about half her height—assuming she was guessing the situation correctly from the various shades of blurs she saw.
“There we are,” the first voice said as Addy was lowered gently onto a bench. “As I said, confusion is normal and will likely linger. There could be permanent gaps in your memory. One cannot ascend and remain the same.”
“What sort of confusion can we expect?” a second voice that Addy vaguely recognized asked.
“It will be rather extreme for a day or two, though that is not so much due to the ritual as being unconscious for nearly two hundred years. Imagine the confusion you might feel when waking from a sleep that long.
“The lingering confusion will likely manifest as gaps in the mistress’s memory, though it will be compounded by, once again, being unconscious for hundreds of years. The world has undoubtedly changed significantly from what she remembers. This will likely be a shock, though each person might handle the same situation differently. I cannot say fully how our lady will react,” the first voice lectured.
The blurs began to sharpen, Addy’s vision restoring to what she was used to, and then sharpening further beyond. Colors she had never seen raced across her vision, hazes of beautiful colors that floated up listlessly into the sky, itself awash in a strange red, though dark, like a dark blue as the sun sets.
She froze as she locked eyes with the owner of the second voice. She knew him to be the owner, as she now recognized him, and his tone of voice immediately lodged in her memory.
“Ramose,” she said simply.
“My lady,” Ramose said, placing a hand across his chest and bowing deeply.
“Akhenaten,” Addy said to the owner of the first voice, monotone and numb.
“At your service, mistress,” Akhenaten assured, mimicking Ramose’s gesture, though with a strange finger salute accompanying it.
This was not right. Ramose was the Overseer of her Guild in Prelude, Nemesis. Akhenaten was the Astronomer, the NPC she had rescued to secure access to the Celestial Primarch path.
No…no no no no nononono—
“My lady, it pleases me beyond measure to congratulate you on your successful ascension,” Ramose said, a warm smile on his face, still in a half-bow.
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