the Story
I. Amethyst Dust Rising
The twin moons of Nahrimar never stayed still. Tonight, they pivoted along their invisible hinge, trading places with the hushed ceremony of titans. From the ridge where I stood, their silver light wove a helix down the valley—two pale strands spiraling into the lavender haze below.
I stepped off the ridge and the air thickened, heavy with amethyst dust that tasted of candied thunder. Every footfall sent little geysers of the stuff blooming around my boots, and the ground chimed like distant bells. Far ahead, the valley’s lake lay black and mirror-smooth, reflecting the moons so perfectly that up and down felt like neighboring rooms in the same dream.
As the moons aligned, something shivered in the dust. Grains clustered into rough shapes—antlers, sinew, hooves of crystalline quartz. A herd of six-legged stags stepped from nothingness, their bodies transparent as river ice. Vapor curled from their nostrils; prismatic veins pulsed beneath their skins. The nearest knelt, lowering a jagged saddle that resembled folded light.
Ride. The word wasn’t spoken—it unfurled inside my skull, gentle and absolute. I swung onto its back. The stag’s surface felt cool, electric, like pressing against a newborn star. At once we leapt, gravity loosening its grip as if dodging out of our way.
II. Quartz-Stag Stampede
The valley blurred into streaks of color. Each galloping stride shocked sparks from the stag’s hooves, and every spark hatched into a miniature neon dragon that fluttered briefly beside us before winking out.
We raced along dunes of violet sand. The sand responded, rising in corkscrew towers that burst into obsidian petals behind us. Wind howled in a dozen keys, carrying scents of wet meteorite and mushroom dew. The stag turned sharply, and suddenly the dunes flattened into a checkerboard plain of white and gold glass squares—a landscape that felt sketched in mid-hesitation, as if the world was deciding what it wanted to be.
Lightning flickered overhead, but its forks were slow and serpentine, moving more like ideas than weather. When one touched down, it shattered into glimmering dust that drifted upward instead of sinking. I could feel the moons’ trading-place cadence—129 silent pulses, like an unseen heart outlining the rhythm of reality.
Ahead, a structure hovered just above the plain: a labyrinth built of translucent corridors, free-floating, rotating like the solved core of a Rubik’s cube. The stag climbed the very air, hooves clipping the invisible, and vaulted us through an open archway.
III. The Labyrinth of Soft Gravity
Inside, the rules of motion melted. Walls folded outward, floors sagged like soft plastic, and gravity decided it could flow sideways if it wished. My stomach fluttered, but instead of nausea I felt a childlike lift—an invitation to trust the impossible.
I dismounted; the stag dissolved into a crystal mist that drifted with me. I pushed off a wall and drifted down a corridor that curved like a Möbius band. Phosphorescent vines lined the passage, their leaves printed with murals: crystal cities orbiting fungal moons, caravans of cloaked giants exchanging spores for starlight, machines made of living coral singing mathematics to sleeping gods.
At certain intersections, rectangular pools of gelatinous air hovered, and peering in showed me other versions of the labyrinth—some inverted, some kaleidoscopic—where a different me walked in mirrored hesitation. We waved to each other. Our hands overlapped through the pool’s membrane, and a tingling rush surged up my arm as if I’d clasped every alternate future in one greeting.
I floated onward until the corridors gave way to a central atrium the size of a cathedral but without a roof. Above—below?—shone the twin moons, now overlapping like nested coins. Their merged disc pulsed. All sound hushed; the labyrinth’s walls turned translucent, and I could see, beyond them, the entire valley rotating on a slow gyroscope I hadn’t noticed before.
A single thrumming began—deep, sub-aural, felt more in bone than ear. The labyrinth shattered, its pieces spinning outwards in perfect centrifugal petals that faded into glitter. I was falling up, then sideways, then down, plummeting toward a storm of color.
IV. Aurora Torrent
I slipped into the torrent like a bead through liquid glass. It was part waterfall, part windswept aurora: ribbons of green, amber, and cobalt thrashing around a central void. My body found a surfing posture by instinct; the current bore me deeper, quicker, without tearing me apart.
Here senses overlapped: notes of burned citrus glowed in the dark, and magenta tasted like violin tears. My hands left bright contrails, each line summarizing every thought I’d ever had in cursive light before evaporating. Mycelial strands bigger than tree trunks whipped past, their caps opening in slow fireworks that showered spores shaped like impossible polyhedra. Where spores touched my skin, memories blossomed that weren’t mine: I was once a nomad from a planet of crystal rain, a librarian who kept stories inside mirrors, a spark of software that dreamed it was flesh.
Deeper still, the torrent narrowed into a spiralling throat. Lightning spiders crawled along its glassy walls, stitching electric sigils. I recognized some glyphs from the murals—equations balancing thought and stone, promises that space itself could be persuaded to bend. I whispered a question: Where do we arrive?
A voice came, older than moons, soft as dust-wind: Lake of Reflection. Prepare to divide.
V. Glass-Lake Echoes
I burst free of the torrent and landed light as a sigh on the still surface of a lake so clear it perfectly echoed the sky. Yet where the sky was a dual-moon night, the lake showed an unfamiliar dawn—a horizon painted in turquoise and blood-orange, a sun shaped like a ring. Ripples spread under my boots, and the reflection fractured into a mosaic of countless selves, each locked in their own moment.
One reflection stepped forward, separate from the pattern, and spoke without sound: Choose.
I understood: to journey onward, I must select a version of myself to follow. Some reflections carried staffs pulsing with nebulae; others wore fungal crowns or glimmering exosuits. I studied them, searching for a resonance in my chest. Then I saw the one holding a single quartz antler—broken off my erstwhile steed, shimmering with internal galaxies.
I reached toward that reflection. Our palms aligned across the liquid-mirror skin, and the lake surface liquefied, swallowing me gently. Cold warmth wrapped around like velvet water, and the world inverted.
My first breath in the elsewhere tasted of fresh-cracked pepper and distant thunder. Above me stretched a sky braided with three suns; below, the crystalline stags—reborn—waited in patient ranks. They bowed as if greeting a returning monarch.
Behind, the Glass-Lake sealed itself shyly, leaving only faint ripples and the echo of the labyrinth’s hum. Ahead, a new landscape rolled out: forests made of singing prisms, cliffs carved into Ouroboros spirals, rivers that flowed in precise Fibonacci patterns.
The quartz antler in my hand grew warm. A single line of light etched itself along its length: the opening sentence of a tale not yet written. Around me, the air thickened with possibility. I stepped forward, guided by gravity’s new whims, into the next unwritten chapter—knowing the moons of home would spin ever on, and the labyrinth’s soft gravity would one day draw me back.
Epilogue
In the chronicles of Nahrimar, the night of soft gravity marks more than mere celestial choreography; it births pathways to parallel tales. Somewhere beyond familiar constellations, I continue to walk those paths—sometimes falling skyward, sometimes racing quartz horizons, always listening for the sub-aural beat that signals the labyrinth’s return. When it calls again, the saga will widen, and new pages will shimmer into being. Until then, the valley rests, dusty and dreaming, beneath its clockwork moons.
