In an instant, she lived through lifetimes of memories, recollections of events that occurred long before she’d been alive, long before the world around her twisted into the malicious manifestation it had become. She saw luscious trees, clear rivers caressing the land twixt which it flowed, foreign creatures with soft fur grazing on flora the likes of which seemed impossible to exist beneath a sapphire sky. Yet simultaneously she saw much the opposite, fires raging, ravaging the same lands, clear water running red with blood and gore, sapphire sky darkened by black clouds and crimson lightning. Cities of men standing tall and proud, then reduced to the same rubble which she’d come to know all too well, unaware that some of the stones she traversed across from time to time were unmarked graves.
She stumbled backward, pressing her palms against her eyes in a vain attempt to quell the visions flashing before them. Faces of individuals she’d never met before, yet knew as though they were her own kin flooded her mind, mashing faces of humans and monsters together into an abomination that was neither human nor inhuman. Thoughts and ideas that never occurred to her before became familiar, and concepts she’d never heard of were digested and understood. In her self-inflicted darkness, she spent eons, but when everything began to quiet down, and she opened her eyes, it was still the same night, the same group around her, now turned toward her in a circle wearing countenances telling both of concern and something she could only describe as revulsion. The ground before her where the rapidly decaying body of their enemy once lay was now empty, marked only by deep impressions left in its wake. The final remnants of him faded away as translucent wisps leeching into the hand with which she reached out, and though the world around her bore eerie silence, within the confines of her mind, she could hear his voice, distant and indecipherable, as though entombed beneath layers of steel.
Welcome to the abyss 