And finally, reluctantly, she let go.
A sigh -softer than thought, heavier than the world- escaped her lips, the weight of it pressing into the space between us like a thing unseen. Like that awkward moment when you realize you've been talking to yourself at a party because the person you were chatting with left fifteen minutes ago, but infinitely more cosmic.
I came back to myself then, blinking as a new notification tugged at my awareness, persistent as a blinking hotel room voicemail light that no one ever checks. Or that ex who still likes your social media posts three years after the restraining order.
System Notification: Essence Drain Activated Partial Success – Ability Interference Detected
Lily, Specter [Echo of the First, She Who Walked Away]
Essence Absorbed: A fragment of primordial defiance lingers within you.
New Attribute Gained: Wings of the Forsaken – The whispers of fallen wings weave into your essence, granting resistance to forces that seek to bind or break you.
Ability Unlocked: Veil of the Unbowed – A barrier born of divinity and rebellion, shielding you from the judgment of lesser gods.
Additional knowledge and skills: [Redacted] – The knowledge of the First - - is not so easily claimed.
Duration of Newly Acquired Abilities: [Unknown].
Congratulations! Your tether to Lily has momentarily set you apart from the children of dust. But beware- The gifts of the forsaken are never freely given.
I barely managed to keep my expression neutral as I processed the information the message revealed, which was about as easy as trying to solve a Rubik's cube while riding a mechanical bull. My poker face was holding on by the metaphorical fingernails of my self-control.
The First? Redacted? What the hell was that supposed to mean? And the total lack of real descriptions on the abilities was annoying as hell. The universe had a nasty habit of dropping cryptic breadcrumbs that led straight into the lion's den of consequences I wasn't prepared for.
I had an intuition, but no proof -like knowing the milk's gone bad without opening the carton.
I turned my gaze back to Lily, her features soft, almost fragile in the dim light of this strange place. She looked like she belonged on a Renaissance painter's canvas -all ethereal grace and hidden sorrow- not in whatever cosmic waiting room we currently occupied.
No. There's no way.
She was too small, too innocent, too... not demonic overlord-y. No sulfurous aura, no ominous Latin chanting in the background, not even the courtesy of a dramatic cape. The universe's most dangerous beings rarely advertised themselves with neon signs, but still.
And yet-
There was something about her. Something that felt ancient in a way I couldn't explain, like finding hieroglyphics in your breakfast cereal. Something that hummed beneath my skin, making the Hunger inside me coil, tense, and -damnit- hungry. The sensation crawled through my veins like electricity searching for ground, setting every nerve ending on high alert.
I felt stronger and more potent than I had since I became a blood drinker. My senses were dialed up to eleven, the world around me sharpening into crystal clarity that bordered on painful. Colors had depth, shadows had texture, and the air itself seemed to whisper secrets just beyond my comprehension.
All that from a taste. A taste of a ghost.
Talk about a random encounter. If my life were a video game, this would be the moment the difficulty setting mysteriously cranked itself up while the tutorial screen was still loading.
I was going to say something clever, probably some remark about ghostly stat boosts and loot drops -because nothing says "processing existential revelations" like poorly timed gaming references- but Lily finally answered my first question.
"As to where you are," she hesitated, her eyes shifting to the side, as if searching for something that wasn't there. Or maybe avoiding something that was.
"It is the Hidden," her voice was soft now, almost reverent, like someone whispering in a library housed inside a cathedral. "A realm between."
I frowned. Between where? Between dimensions? Between realities? Between the appetizer and main course of some cosmic dinner where I was potentially on the menu?
The question slipped out before I could even think about it. "Between where?" My voice echoed slightly, as if the space itself was curious about the answer.
She looked at me, her expression suddenly far too guarded, like a chess player who's seen twelve moves ahead and doesn't like the endgame. "Between our home... and Earth." Soft words. Heavy meaning.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
I felt it in my bones, that peculiar weight of truth that lands like a meteor, leaving impact craters in your perception of reality.
She wouldn't meet my eyes now, and I didn't know why. The air between us thickened with unspoken revelations, dense as cemetery fog at midnight.
Something wasn't being said. Something big. Something that made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention like tiny soldiers preparing for war.
A slow unease crept into me, curling in my gut like a whisper of things I wasn't ready to understand. Like finding out your childhood imaginary friend left a business card and tax documents in your attic.
"Hey."
I didn't mean for my voice to be that gentle, didn't mean for my hand to move, but it did, acting with a mind of its own -like every impulsive decision I've ever made, only this one didn't involve tequila or regrettable text messages.
I reached forward, tilted her chin up, guiding her gaze back to mine. The contact sent a shiver of something through my fingertips -power, recognition, warning- I couldn't tell which.
Her eyes -no longer too big, no longer distant- looked human now. Gone was the otherworldly vacancy, replaced by depths I could drown in if I wasn't careful. And I've never been particularly careful.
And not just her eyes.
The wild, tangled mess of her hair had smoothed, the sharp, flickering edges of her form had softened, as if she had been... reassembling herself. Like watching a jigsaw puzzle solve itself in reverse, pieces fitting together to reveal the picture they were always meant to be.
No longer ephemeral. No longer flickering like a candle in the wind.
Now she was standing before me, as solid and real as most fanboys wished Cortana could be. She was the definition of ravishing. Gorgeousness personified. The kind of beauty that Renaissance painters would have started religious wars over, all wrapped in an aura of something ancient and deeply, profoundly other.
And I couldn't help but smile. Because when faced with the incomprehensible, sometimes all you can do is grin and pretend you're in on the cosmic joke.
"Tell me more about home," I said gently, like I was coaxing a stray cat rather than potentially poking at primordial secrets that predated the invention of common sense.
And for the first time, she truly looked at me. Not through me, not past me, but at me, with a gaze that seemed to catalog every mistake, triumph, and mediocre takeout decision I'd ever made.
"It would be better if I showed you."
∞
I didn't know what to expect. When someone offers to show you their "home" that exists in some realm between worlds, the possibilities range from cosmic IKEA showroom to the inside of a Lovecraftian nightmare.
One moment she was looking at me. A flicker later, her cool hand was touching my face -her fingers pressing against my head in a mind melding shape that had me questioning just how out of touch with modern life she actually was. Spock would've been proud, though his eyebrow would've reached unprecedented heights of judgment.
Then I fell into the past.
Not stumbled, not dipped -fell, like taking a header off the high dive into the Mariana Trench of memory. The sensation of plummeting through time hit me with all the subtlety of a freight train doing the cha-cha through a crystal shop.
The present dissolved around me like sugar in rain, and history rushed up to meet me with open arms and teeth bared.
∞
The images flooded my consciousness like a tsunami of memory that wasn't mine -vivid, ancient, weighted with a grief that transcended millennia.
My mind tried to make sense of what she was showing me, filling in the details in the only way it could -with references to my own experiences.
"We were an ancient race," Lily's voice echoed within my mind, resonant with dignified sorrow. "Almost elven in appearance. But we were different, more advanced -we once thrived on a world not too dissimilar to Earth."
The kind of beings that fantasy authors would have wet dreams about, I thought, trying to process what I was seeing. Except without the controversial ear-fetish descriptions or inexplicable fondness for singing about trees. Her memories unfolded like pages from a book that had been written in starlight and bound in regret.
"Our civilization stood at the pinnacle of progress," she continued, as impossible visions of crystalline spires and impossible architecture unfolded before me. "Our technology rivaling magic, our knowledge spanning epochs."
Think Apple's R&D department if Steve Jobs had lived for ten thousand years and had access to the cheat codes of reality. I watched towering structures that seemed to defy gravity, materials that shifted and responded to thought alone, beings who had mastered the art of existing in multiple dimensions simultaneously. The memories had the fuzzy edges of something ancient yet carried the sharp sting of recent loss.
Her voice grew heavier. "But pride comes before the fall, and our fall came in the form of a proto-virus -a creeping, insidious thing, a sickness not of the flesh, but of essence itself."
Part zombie apocalypse, but with more existential blue screen of death. I felt the weight of extinction pressing against my consciousness as her memories showed me a once-vibrant people fading -not dying, but becoming less. Diminishing like stars at dawn, their light still there but overwhelmed by something greater and more terrible.
"A swift extinction," she whispered, and I could feel the grief radiating from her like physical heat. "An end without violence, without war -just fading, dwindling, erasure."
Like watching your favorite streaming show get canceled one season at a time until all you have left are poorly written fan theories on Reddit. The tragedy of it hit me in waves -not the quick merciful end of a catastrophe, but the slow, creeping death of hope, one day at a time, until even memory becomes suspect.
"With no other option, we turned to the last of our great machines, the colony ship -an ark meant to carry us to salvation."
Not exactly Noah's two-by-two animal dating service, but the same desperate energy of packing everything you care about because the landlord's evicting you tomorrow. In her memories, I saw the last remnants of a dying race, their forms already translucent around the edges, boarding a vessel that seemed more idea than object -a ship built from mathematics and willpower as much as matter.
"And with the press of a button, we activated a desperate gambit," Lily continued, her mental voice somber as a funeral bell.
The jump drive roared to life in my borrowed memory, a sound like the universe clearing its throat before delivering bad news. The noise vibrated through me, not just heard but felt -the kind of sound that rearranges your atoms and leaves you fundamentally changed on the other side.
"The ship tore through the fabric of space," she said as I witnessed reality itself peeling apart, "hurling us across the vast unknown, searching for a world that could sustain our people."
Interstellar without the Matthew McConaughey monologues or the power of love transcending dimensions. Just raw, blind hope and engineering that was one loose bolt away from catastrophic failure. I watched as the universe folded like origami around the ship, stars becoming streaks becoming nothing, and then -something else.
- Followers go up? Boom, bonus chapter.
- Favorites go up? Ka-ching, bonus chapter.
- Reviews? Cue the confetti -bonus chapter and a shoutout, because I care.
- Ratings go up? You guessed it -bonus chapter. (And I might even crack a smile. Maybe.)