Nannade struggled her way free and gasped for air beneath a bright sky adorned by a single black star. She pushed the rock apart, like brittle, mouldy wood and emerged from the mountain’s slope on the other side, soaked in blood, fleshy chunks and gooey shreds. Red and pulsating like flesh the mountain mass stood above her, and a thousand trickles of blood and chunks were flowing from a great wound further upwards, not far from her, from where a blue and soothing light shone.

Ssil flew above her, unfettered and free, swimming through the air without effort. She stayed far from Nannade, but did not leave her alone.

“It’s how we’re destined to be, isn’t it?”

Nannade looked down the mountain. She saw dozens of humanoid figures, crawling upwards the slope, groaning in pain and desperation, all converging on the light, but all expiring before reaching it. She made her way upwards as well.

“To go beyond the veil is to enter endless impossibilities.” Was what Elissa had once told her. “Stray too far or stay too long, and you return not yourself, if ever.”

She could feel a burning in her heart, urging her to continue onward, a burning pain that sought the cooling light in the distance. As she came closer, she saw that the light was coming from a hut, standing amidst a forest of stone pillars.

“Beyond the veil is where impossibilities and promises come from.” Elissa had told her when Nannade had kept on pushing her for answers. “People may think impossibilities are paths for the future that can be walked, but they might just as well be lies, deceit and false hopes. Nothing is certain there. Not even your own existence.”

She passed a body of one of the humanoid figures. It was malformed, tired out, not yet dead, but soon to expire. She did not stop, stopping here could distract her just long enough to get lost. She continued on to the light. Ssil grew more and more restless, the closer Nannade got, but both of them knew that everything, if anything at all, would be resolved there.

The hut came closer. Unrotting corpses littered Nannade’s way, desperate life springing in tumours, tendrils and tentacles from the dead flesh, trying but failing to continue its journey upwards, dying and reviving until it was a slowly crawling slime that dried out in the cold shadow of the star, up to several feet before the hut, where the blood seeped from the ground and washed the chunks back down, nothing made it up here, except for Nannade.

Ssil tried to tell her something before she could open the door. There was something, far from here but further from everywhere else. Something that Sill would have to give her.

“Not today, this here is at hand, nothing else.”

But when else would there be time for it?

“There will be.”

When else would she need it as much as now, to steel herself against the Maiden’s influence?

“I don’t need it.”

Before Ssil could object more, Nannade passed through the door. A blue fire burned slowly in the fireplace. A family of statues was rejoicing in each other’s company, the table set for supper with a bowl of steaming potatoes, a pot of butter and golden scrambled eggs. She tried to get closer, but Ssil shot between her and her goal.

“So this is the confrontation we need to face?”

The serpent hissed at her.

“What venom is life to you that you cannot allow it inside of me?”

Ssil remained stalwart.

“Fine. Let it be so.”

Nannade shot forward, trying to grasp the serpent by the throat, but she dodged upwards, eluding her just below the ceiling. Nannade tried to reach her by jumping, but she was out of reach still. She grabbed plates and cups from the table and threw them at Ssil, hitting a few times, until the serpent dodged downward. A quick swipe and she was in Nannade’s hand, her claws burying in deep at the neck.

The serpent reared her head to bite Nannade, but she grabbed the head quickly with her other hand and pressed down. The serpent coiled and writhed in her hands, trying to break free, but finally, opening her mouth in defeat, going limp and ceasing all movement.

Nannade had won. She stepped closer to the statue of the mother. Carefully she stroked the featureless face and the stone rippled like water, but when it had returned to calmness, Nannade could not see herself in it. It would take someone else to do that.

She headed outside and looked over the twisted and sick landscape. Beings still tried and failed to crawl to the hut. She held the limp serpent in her claws. She decided she would still be of use somehow and held on to her.

Nannade looked up to the sky and the black star. “Falling there is easy, the mind willingly flies away unfettered by reality” Were the last words Elissa was willing to impart on Nannade before forbidding her to ever ask about the place beyond the veil again. “But getting back out, finding back to reality is impossible, if you go unprepared.”

Nannade knew a way back out. She looked deeper into the darkness. Although it seemed to cast its shadow far across the bright sky, it was just a single point. There was a glimmer of something real at that single point. Like a thread of spider silk, impossible to feel by hand, but still it was there. Like the thread that had once guided her out of the forest of dreams, this shall show her back to through the crystal water pool. She closed her eyes, stretched her mind upwards and reached for the thread.