Hundredth Dream

The ruined temple couldn't cage Nazha's screams.

Beyond its crumbled stone arch, the six moons hung low, full and hovering over the mountain peaks like sentinels. Their barren faces bored into Nazha's heart. Waiting.

In their shadow, the breath of the other seeresses clouded as they murmured, trying to ignore her cries. She'd begged them for this after all. They didn't believe it could be done, and they wanted no part in this blasphemy. Creation was meant only for the Gods, they said, but Nazha didn't believe They would leave them to rot.

No one had spoken to a God in millennia, let alone attempted to peer into Their memories. This was a communion blessed not by prayer, but the silence of her sisters. A hundred times. That was what she had promised them. She'd thought she would find the answer, but doubt loomed as she chewed the last leaf of Dreamer's Tongue, its cool bite like liquid fire down her throat. It spread, burning newborn veins of starlight.

Nazha's fingernails dug into the stone as her soul splintered, smoke constricting her nostrils as her lungs heaved for air.

It's worth it. It's worth it.

The words hammered in her mind faster than her struggling heart. Power snagged along her spine as the magic clawed its way in, as desperate as she was.

The temple blurred at the edges of her vision, splitting and refocusing as her spirit tore from her body, her consciousness unraveling to fill the space. Black stone and tattered banners. Gilded stained glass.

Nazha saw herself now, her awareness suspended from above. Below, her form sprawled out, small and sideways over the dusty floor. Inky hair fanned over pointed ears and cobalt skin.

Dead?

Her mind whispered, fear sparking through her core, but no. Nazha had been here ninety-nine times before. Just as she had promised her sisters, this hundredth communion would be the last.

Even so, she stretched back for her body, but the magic sent her awareness careening upward with her heart in her throat. Away from the familiar black stone into an abyss darker than even that. Her spirit rattled with a panic older than her discarded mortal form.

It's worth it.

Pinpricks of light speckled into the dark, swelling into barricades of blinding white. This was as far as she'd ever come.

Had the pattern of light not been burned into her memory from previous attempts, she might never have found the strength to push past the searing agony, but there in a starless gap within the maw she spied it. A cradle of feathered light, and at its center, Indramar and her six moons, not barren this time, but bright. Gold, green, blue, silver. Continents. Water.

Home.

Nazha could've wept, had she a true body here. But, maybe, it was only an overactive mind addled by Dreamer's Tongue? Her own wishful thinking poisoned her with a false dream? She froze.

Indramar's oceans were so full, her moons nothing she could've conjured herself. The others were wrong. There was hope, life was possible, and the answer to bringing it was deeper.

Dread frosted through Nazha, her hold on the magic slipping, light blaring through to drown out Indramar, but she braced. Distantly, her body thrashed, sweat slicking the stone. This was the hundredth time. The last time. If there was any hope to be had, it would be made here.

Nazha barreled through the light, through the abyss, and crashed across the surface of the silver moon.

Her eyes slitted open to wavering blades of silver grass, at least twice as tall as her. Wind rippled the fields, casting a gentle ring as they slid against each other like blades.

Staggering to her feet she ran a spectral finger through the grass, flinching back as pain razored over her fingertips. Blood slipped down her hand and she turned it over, realizing with a start that this grass was more than grass. Silvered metal. Ildrae. The conduit of deep magics that could feed life back into their dying universe. A whole world of it. Unnatural and unheard of, which meant one thing; the answer she sought was somewhere on this moon.

Jagged mountains rose like old teeth, higher and higher as she moved through the sea of blades. No direction to go on but what her gut told her. North, and north again, until the sea finally parted, a shining city of concentric districts and luminous Ildrae towers; a design her people had created.

Joy and relief bubbled in her chest. This was the Goddess's dream for them.

Indramarians walked the streets. Varying shades of blue skin and all manners of hair, gossamer fabrics that glimmered in shafts of afternoon sunlight peeking through the other moons. Their dialect was different, a cadence with more lilt than the bite of her own, the words too slippery for her to grasp. None of them saw her, they themselves dream-made specters, meandering and drinking in the smell of parchment and incense.

Nazha winced, a smoldering pain blooming in her legs. The ritual was beginning to fail and soon- so would her body. If there was anything worth finding here, it would be safeguarded in the city's heart.

She sprinted down the winding streets. Each Indramarian she passed through struck her like cold water, blind to her intrusion. Pain lanced up her sides, stealing her unnecessary breath. The limits of the ritual's magic were close, and if she pressed beyond this, Nazha didn't want to imagine the cost.

The city's heart opened for her, a wide gate smothered in runes and the steady thrum of deep magic. Down she sped, gasping, dragging her hands across the walls. Spots of black popped into her vision as she stumbled down the last step.

Light, bright as the barricade in the abyss, slammed into her. A barrier. A failsafe her mind employed. Her heart stuttered.

Deeper she stretched her consciousness, beyond the curtain of white, her body aflame with dying nerves, her mind reeling, desperate for her to return. Still, she pressed, the final barrier tearing, its edges snapping back.

The deep thrum of magic was joined now by a high keening. They paired, danced with a resonance Nazha had never heard before. Never felt magic so encompassing. It was nothing and everything all at once.

Awe blunted the pain, drove her forward towards a device of countless spinning rings, a metallic core nestled within, the source of the higher frequency. The things it could be capable of. She sucked in a breath, this time from the pain that nearly bent her in two.

Nazha reached for the core, her hands passing through the rings, each cut vibrating her until it was almost uncontrollable. Fire raged through her bones, brain spinning until her fingers brushed metal.

A pattern burst in her mind's eye, an intricate weave of magic. Divine knowledge. This was the thing that would push their research over the edge and bring life to the moons. She carved it into her thoughts, tucked it in her soul like a crumbling flower, worried it wouldn't survive the journey back to her body.

Nazha's being was fully aflame now. A fire that ignited every cell. It was time to go.

Blinding white faded to hazy grey, the city and its moon disintegrating until Nazha was left in the black with only a distant crack of light ahead. From there, she felt the grit of stone beneath her, the frantic calls of her sisters, and their footsteps closing in.

They thought she'd failed. Maybe she still would.

Nazha closed the distance to find a splintered shard of her soul had wedged open a gap between the planes, bridging just enough for a tendril of magic to whisper through and slip into her ragged form writhing before the altar. Pain shredded her from flesh to bone. Her breaths shallow. She couldn't move.

No. No. She hadn't come this far to fade out on a dirty floor without giving them the glimmer of hope she'd promised. So close now. She imagined them dressed in the strange fabrics from the dream, burning incense in the city streets to bless it before the morning's work.

Summoning the sphere's weave in her mind she poured every bit of power she had into a single finger, and traced the pattern into the dust. They were silent now, fixated, careful not to disturb the marks as her finger stuttered across the floor to finish the last thread.

Nazha's breath ghosted between her cracked lips, silken hands caressing her face and smoothing her damp hair. The magic she'd borrowed slithered out from her finger and back to her disembodied spirit beyond the gap.

Her sisters sang, somber hymns that trailed after her retreat like mourners, the chills she would've gotten impossible now that the tether to her body had withered. They kissed her forehead and murmured goodbyes, Nazha aching to do the same, but as she watched the youngest copy the weave's design, the pain evaporated.

Nazha had touched the mind of a God and this was the price: One hundred rituals and her life. There were no prayers, no religious or scholarly texts to tell her what came next. But she'd done what she'd promised, and... it was worth it.

Acknowledgment to Reedsy.com for providing the prompt that inspired the story.

Contest #323 Rituals

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts