A dark shore. I stand on the edge of a sea, red water lapping at my feet, black sand churning with each gentle crash of the surf, dragging me just a bit deeper. Dunes of pitch rise behind me across the shoreline, the only light sprinkling down from a wan half-moon overhead, pale and sickly. The salt spray on the wind carries a hint of iron and even where the red waves churn white out on the rocks sticking from the water, there is no sound.

  A single word rolls back to me on the tide, an echo asking where this is, my voice distorted and made so small. I pull my feet from wet sand, walking back on the shoreline, each slap of my skin against the beach making another ringing echo that bounces through the air in a way that makes me feel someone is always walking just behind me. I turn, this way and that, but I never catch sight of a follower.

  How did I come to be here? Time loses meaning as I walk down the shore, the only change being the chaotic ebb of the waves crawling up the beach, spilling out, pulling in, over and over again. Sometimes I feel cold, like the sea spray carries with it a chill, never enough to make me shiver, hardly enough to notice. I am supposed to be doing something, but I can’t remember what. Why can’t I make my right hand unclench?

  I grow so tired of walking down the beach I start to count the steps. I look to the moon time and time again, but it never shifts overhead. The only movement remains the gentle lapping of the waves, the only feeling the dead air all about me, the only sound the crunching of my own feet on black shores.

  A shadow grows out of the shore ahead, something small jutting from the water, too small to be one of the fang-like stones. The dark outline forms into the shape of a girl standing knee-deep in the waves, arms held about her as she shivers silently, light reflecting up from the water to bathe her in red. The red sea foams as I kick through the shallows, stopping as I stand over the quaking girl; she can be no older than ten. Her cries make no sound; my voice is absent when I bend to ask her what is wrong.

  I reach for her shoulder, and then I am away. I crouch at the corner of the home, back in the orchard, my child hands groping at the wood, watching as men beat my father in the dirt out front. I bite my lip so hard it almost bleeds. One looks over, straight at me, a smile on his lips before he puts a boot into my father’s ribs, and I curl back around the house, sinking to the dirt and wrapping my arms around my knees. How old am I now? Doesn’t matter. I know now that I am a coward, a scared little girl, and that is all I will be.

  My foot crunches into the sand, a divot in the side of the dune carrying away my balance. I tumble, hands scratching at the black sand, but the slope is too steep. I slide still in a spray at the bottom of the huge hill of sand, spitting gritty mica. The sea is gone, the world made of rising and sloping dunes of dark sand, carrying off like waves barely illuminated by the glowing moon overhead. The girl, her eyes a terrible red, tears streaking her cheek, stands in front of me as I flounder. I am so tired, my arms run out and exhausted. The effort to pull myself from the sand, to stand as the footing beneath my heels shifts and slides, is almost too much to be worth it, but I know that if I stay down, surrender myself to the earth now, I will never rise again.

  She stares up at me, hate in her red little eyes, and I reach for her. My fingers run down her hair, so light and wispy it may as well be made of silk. I try to tell her that I can hear her, that her voice is the world, and that I know it, but the sound is dead here.

  I stand on the edge of a forest, looking back at a graveyard of youth and dreams. Huge bears tear at the land, giants among them wading through bodies and blood, watching while their fellows rip apart the young. Macille cries out, trying to drag himself back toward the ruin, tears running down his face as he pulls, but I have him around the neck. I pull him away despite his protests, despite the way he calls out, because I want him for myself. I force the man to abandon the field, abandon his brother, and seal both their fates at once.

  Then the sands return, but I am the girl now–always was I know–staring up at myself. The celestial light casts me in shadow, forcing a halo to glow from the wild tangles that frame my face, and I see what is truly ugly in this world. The woman there, that girl, she is so small. She claws desperately for something to aspire to, something set her apart, but even her hate and anger aren’t enough to make her special. She sneers at the world. She begs and burns and screams, but she has nothing worth hearing, nothing worth caring for. How fragile. How many would be better off if she did not exist in this world?

  “We should lie down,” I say, my words my own and the girl’s both. I look down at that crimson child, finally understanding what her tears are for. She has always carried them in her heart, I always have, would it not be better to lay that down now? The words bounce from the dunes around, their reverberation a soft voice that caresses me. Why should I not put it all down, the heavy things that I have decided to carry, the things that fit so roughly upon my shoulders? My shoulders are so thin, not meant for carrying anything important.

  The sand rattles beneath my feet, drawing me down like the shore of a beach, and I begin to sink. My feet feel the warmth of the earth like a favorite blanket. It would not be so bad to let go of it all here. Not so bad at all.

  A brilliant light blooms at the edge of the next dune, a pulse flying through the very earth, forcing everything still. I stare at the line of sand at the top of the rise, white light bleeding away from the edge of it, transfixed. A shape, a moving object of infinite sides and complexity climbs from the rise, and on its smooth surfaces are painted the glowing symbols of concepts too vast to fathom. Within it are simpler shapes, each growing more knowable as they grow smaller, each new one nested within the last, but none less powerful for their understandability. The size of the whole may as well be the moon, it glows brighter than it certainly, making the dark sand glitter like the desert under the noonday sun.

  A woman walks beneath the light, made black by the way she eclipses it, so small next to the enormity of it, but somehow larger than life all the same. She is a vision of power, all crimson and gold, impossible to know if the rippling scales that cover her are a part of her or not. Then, with a step, she is before me, looking down at me like my mother may have once done. She wears a scar on her face, but the moment I notice it, it has gone away from me. Eyes, all black and red, slit down the center like the eyes of a terrible serpent look at me with dread and compassion.

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  The titanic shape still perched at the edge of a dune groans, arcs of light snapping up through its entirety as the spinning shapes inside clunk and grow still. Bolts, like colored lightning, stab both from the center of the smallest of the shapes and the faces of the outermost shell at once, setting the myriad of faces they pass through alight, the glowing symbols on their surface pegged into place by the power, made into an intricate pattern.

  Fire stands from the woman’s shoulders, its color all blue and silver. The flames spread down her hands, rolling over her like a breeze. She raises her right hand to me, the movement slow and inevitable as she touches my shoulder, squeezes my arm tight. I never even think to pull away from the flames. How impossible would that be?

  “This is not the Nightmare,” she tells me. “Steel yourself for it. Let this shadow pass like wind but remember the taste of it.”

  The thought of vanishing into the sand washes away with those words. My thoughts begin to come back to me. I was doing something. Who else is thinking in my head? There is pain chewing up my gut. How did I not notice that before?

  She turns and looks down at the girl, brings her burning hand over to gently stroke her cheek. “I am so sorry,” the woman says, “but you are not real. Never were.” Then her hand is my hand, blue and silver flames spreading from my palm to climb over the girl’s left side. The tears streaking her face boil away, and she opens her mouth in an empty scream as the world about us turns dark.

  Coriander’s scream is the first sensation. Her face is a mask of agony, blue and silver flames crawling over the side of her, eating into her skin in digging holes, setting her silky onyx hair alight to burn red and stink. We stand on the pebbly road, and I watch as the conflagration chews into her, feeling so little as she cries in dying pain.

  I feel a sharp pain of my own, and look down to find her right hand gripping the handle of a knife, her arm working desperately, pulling the blade out and sticking it back in. A bubble of spit spills out of my mouth, every muscle in my stomach and chest clenching, my arms going rigid. I expect the spit to be blood, but it is only slightly pink drool.

  She tries to pull out of my burning grip, but I have my fingers curled into her burning hair, what remains of her ear caught between my forefinger and thumb. She stabs, wriggles, twists this way and that, but I will not let her go. Now is when it ends, even if I have to let her stab me to death for it. Just now, that can’t be too far off.

  A terrible weight clamps down on my right arm, a big hand covered in steel. “You can’t do this!” The blue and silver flames climb up Macille’s arm as he pulls at me, trying to rip me off of Coriander. I will not let go, never. I will have her now!

  Coriander stabs into previous wounds, and I feel myself coming apart. Macille grunts and strains, his big arms so terribly strong, so irresistible. The fire climbs up them and spills over his shoulder. It crawls over his armor and licks at his face, smoke rising from the flesh it sears. He bites his lip against the pain so hard that a line of blood trickles from his mouth, but he does not stop even as his skin begins to blister, even as the fire starts to catch in his hair.

  A wound bursts on the side of his neck, the skin charred so terribly that it makes a hole that leaks something too awful to be blood. I let go, no conscious thought to it, just wanting to get away from him, just wanting to save him from me.

  My legs give out as my hand unclenches, the remaining strength in Macille’s bulky shoulders just about throwing me to the ground against the rocky wall of the road all down the left side, but I would have found the ground even without his help. He falls back as well, the flames dancing up his armor already dying out. Coriander goes back the other way, hands coming up to her face, one holding a bloody knife, tottering as she screams. Fire clings to her, and she scratches at it with a hand, one eye made white and blind.

  Her foot swings out into the open air over the right side of the road, over the sheer fall. Her leg flexes, instinct driving her to find balance, trying to pull her back, but there are already so many wounds in that leg, holes made by her own knife, that it buckles beneath the effort. She slips away with a scattering of pebbles, no cry, just a moment of terrible realization dawning on her face, and then she is gone.

  I stare at the spot she just was, a woman on fire, the one I hated more than anything in the world. I want to linger, staring at that spot, wanting to make certain that this is real. It doesn’t feel real, but then, I don’t know what it should feel like.

  “We have to stop the bleeding,” Macille says next to me. Burns paint the left side of him, but he behaves as if they aren’t even there, staggering over to me.

  I look down, my own blood trickling through my fingers, finding my stomach a gruesome portrait. I hold my guts in, feeling so horribly faint, falling back against the side of the rocky wall while Macille produces a rag from somewhere, gently moving my hands away to apply it to my wounds.

  “It’s done,” I say, feeling all light and tingly. “I actually did it. It’s all done.”

  “You aren’t done yet,” he says. “Charlene!” He snaps his fingers in front of my face, but it is such an effort to look over to him just then. “You are not done! Stay awake!”

  I can’t help but stare up at the blue sky, a smile coming to me; it seems like no effort at all. Shapes, people I realize, speed through the sky, leaving trails of disturbed air behind them as they all race for the same place, the tower. Macille is shouting something to me, telling me not to go to sleep, but I can’t think of anything more that I would like to do just now. I did it. It doesn’t really seem possible. Then I am stolen away into another dream, this one of my own making, this one far kinder.

  The Passage of the Rising Tide has ended as a total failure

  Competitors: 413

  Slain by monsters: 9

  Slain by other competitors: 27

  Competitors slain in the unknown entity’s attack: 8

  Proctors slain in the attack: 2

  It is recommended that those killed by their fellow competitors should be considered killed by the unknown entity. Its influence on events is still being determined. Investigation persists. Difficult to believe such a thing could have been so subtle to evade as long as it did. It displayed clear signs of actual intelligence.

  To Guildmaster Willian

  -Administrator Gaius Gore

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